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1877-1954 
What to preach 


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WHAT TO PREACH 





THE WARRACK LECTURES FOR 1926 IN NEW 
COLLEGE, EDINBURGH, AND IN THE 
COLLEGES OF THE UNITED FREE 
CHURCH OF SCOTLAND IN 
GLASGOW AND ABERDEEN 


THESE LECTURES WERE ALSO GIVEN AS 
THE RUSSELL LECTURES AT AUBURN 
SEMINARY, AND AS THE SWANDER LEC- 
TURES IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
OF THE REFORMED CHURCH IN THE 
UNITED STATES AT LANCASTER, PENNA. 


BY 
HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 


President of Union Theological Seminary 
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TO PREACH — 


BY 
HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 


BROWN PROFESSOR OF HOMILETICS AND PASTORAL THE- 
OLOGY, AND PRESIDENT, OF THE FACULTY, IN 
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 


NEW YORK ann LONDON 





COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
BY HARFER & BROTHERS 


WHAT TO PREACH 
F-R 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO THE CONGREGATION 


OF THE 


MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 


WHO HAVE GIVEN ME THEIR ENRICHING FRIEND- 
SHIP IN OUR WORK TOGETHER FOR 
ONE AND TWENTY YEARS 


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CONTENTS 


LECTURE PAGE 
I.. Expository PREACHING ‘ : : ps ; 4 11 
II, DocrrinaL PREACHING H : % , ‘ a 4 47 

III. ErnicaL PREACHING . , : ‘ ‘ wiv ie eee 


IV. PastTorRaAt PREACHING . ; : ; a ahtig : ate a 


V. EVANGELISTIC PREACHING . 2 ; ‘ Sethe - 155 





LECTURE I 


HXPOSITORY PREACHING 


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LECTURE I 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 


A youtu, who nearly thirty years ago sat 
where you now sit, found himself again and 
again haunted by the misgiving that he would 
never have enough to preach to keep him minis- 
tering to a congregation week in and week out. 
He had not spoken in public for more than ten 
or fifteen minutes on any theme. He had found 
himself barely able to fill five minutes with ideas 
on even the greatest subject. How would it be 
possible for him, twice on a Sunday, forty odd 
weeks every year, to preach interestingly and en- 
richingly for half an hour? During his course in 
divinity he received much useful counsel on how 
to preach; but he would return to his room to be 
tormented by the old perplexity what to preach, 
so as to be supplied with arresting and informing 
and nourishing material for these relentlessly 
recurring Sundays. He forefancied appalling 
weeks, when no inspiration would visit him, and 
Saturday evening would arrive to find him still 
sermonless. 


This youth had his theological training at a 
11 


12 WHAT TO PREACH 


time when the prophets of Israel had been re- 
cently rediscovered, and the prophetic element 
in religion was stressed almost to the exclusion of 
every other. It was said, as indeed it is still said, 
that preaching must be prophetic. A minister 
was to enter his pulpit and speak as Amos did at 
Bethel, or Isaiah at the royal court in Jerusalem. 
The preacher was to stand upon his watchtower 
or to enter into a secret place and wait, and then 
declare the oracles of God. But this embryonic 
divine felt that no utterance of his had been or 
was ever likely to be oracular. Occasionally he 
had things to say which he wished to say very 
much, and he could usually say them in a very 
few minutes, but they were not in the habit of 
coming to him periodically at seven-day inter- 
vals, nor in such measured abundance as to fur- 
nish him with a twenty-five- or thirty-minute 
sermon Sunday morning and evening, not to 
mention fragments that remained over to be 
served up at the weekly prayer-meeting. 

The prophetic office of the Christian preacher 
has been grossly exaggerated. A preacher may 
prophesy on occasion; but Elijah, Amos and 
Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were 
not parish ministers. None of them preached 
statedly to the same congregation; most of them 
handled a very few aspects of truth. A Greater 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 13 


than they was usually called Teacher, and it 
would be wiser for Christian preachers to strive 
to be worthy of that title. It would have helped 
the divinity student, of whom I have been speak- 
ing, had he been told that instead of seeking to 
exercise a prophetic ministry, he was to fit him- 
self to be a teacher of religion. 

A. teacher plans a course of instruction; he 
does not select his subjects from day to day. He 
has an ideal of a man educated in his discipline. 
He asks himself what elements must enter into 
his teaching, what appreciations he must awaken, 
what information he must impart, what ques- 
tions he must provoke, what purposes he must 
seek to instil. A preacher who would minister in 
the same pulpit for a quarter of a century, or for 
at least a decade, and would train a congregation 
in convictions and ideals, in methods of inter- 
course with the Unseen and in ways of serving 
the commonweal, must follow a similar educa- 
tional system. ‘This is not to say that a preacher 
will not be visited by unexpected and compelling 
inspirations, and given messages which must 
forthwith be delivered. Such visitations of the 
Spirit come—come with crises in the world’s af- 
fairs or in the nation’s life, come in an event that 
startles a community or in a happening to some 
of his people which burdens the minister’s heart, 


14 WHAT TO PREACH 


come in revealing experiences to the man himself, 
Then he cannot but prophesy. But even so it 
will probably not be oftener than once on the 
Sunday, and for the other “diet of worship” (to 
employ your old Scots’ phrase), he will treat 
some other topic, and well for him if, as a wise and 
foresighted instructor, he have a theme to hand 
on which he can speak to his people informingly. 
Preachers may be given one or two glimpses of 
God and His will for men which come home to 
them with such cogency that they are constrained 
to prophesy them, and can do so repeatedly with 
inward. satisfaction; but let a man beware lest 
the aspect of truth which is so congenial to him 
become a hobby, and instead of being rated as a 
prophet he be considered a bore. Prophets were 
never conspicuous for the comprehensiveness of 
their teaching, but rather for the intensity and 
iteration with which they dwelt on one subject. 
A preacher must try, so far as he can, to declare 
the whole counsel of God, and to interpret life in 
fellowship with Him in all its varied ranges to 
older and younger folk of many temperaments 
and conditions. 

These lectures will treat incidentally the tech- 
nique of preaching; their main object is to sug- 
gest to men standing on the threshold of the min- 
istry the diverse elements which should enter into 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 15 


pulpit instruction. If they were to have a text, 
it might be St. Paul’s characterisation of his own 
ministry as “teaching every man in all wisdom, 
that we may present every man mature in 
Christ,” or our Lord’s description of a Christian 
minister as a scribe (and itis surely worth noting 
that He spoke so encouragingly of a scribe, and 
did not bid him cease being a scribe and become 
Elijah or Jeremiah or John the Baptist)—a 
scribe who has been made a student to the king- 
dom of heaven and “bringeth forth out of his 
treasure things new and old.” Such a scribe, a 
faithful scholar and instructor, is, I submit, bet- 
ter qualified to guide, edify and personally be- 
friend a congregation, and lead its corporate 
effort to serve its community, for a long term of 
years, than a temperamental prophet, undoubted 
gifts of God as prophets are. 

The scribe was the teacher of the Law, and 
while it is to be hoped that we have outgrown the 
legalistic conception of religion, and above all no 
longer regard the Bible as codified law for 
theology or ethics or ecclesiastical organization, 
(the Christian preacher finds his chief source of 
‘material in the Scriptures. The literature within 
the covers of our Bible is the standard expression 
of the life with God into which we are to lead our 
people, and the minister who would have his 


16 WHAT TO PREACH 


congregation possess the whole of their glorious 
inheritance will set himself year after year to 
explore with them the contents of the Scripture, 
trying not to pass by any of it which seems to 
have a message for him and them. He will be 
first and foremost an expository preacher. 
There are some who feel that the taking of a 
text is a mere pulpit convention, or the survival 
of an outworn magical conception of the words 
of the Bible. But however a sermon arises in a 
man’s mind—and many of them do not originate 
in texts—it is always the richer and more surely 
Christian for being well grounded in a passage 
of Scripture. A man may have in his mind some 
attitude towards life in his hearers which he 
wishes to correct. For example, they may have 
been caught in the current mental perplexity 
about religion and morals. They did not wish 
this state of blurred vision, but they have ac- 
cepted it and now rather enjoy it because it faces 
them with no insistent obligations and permits 
them to relax and take life easily. He wishes to 
point out the perils of this mental and moral 
vagueness, and show them how with Christ there 
is always something clearly in sight. Well, let 
him take such a text as “The twilight that I de- 
sired hath been turned into trembling unto me.” 
Let him point out how the hours after sunset in 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 17 


Babylon, so prized by glare-wearied men and 
women, in which they enjoyed themselves on 
their balconies or house-tops, became in a siege 
the most dreaded hours of the day, when Elamites 
and Medes could push their assault undetected 
amid the shadows. There will be a distinct gain 
to his sermon, not only from the picturesqueness 
of the text, which will grip his hearers’ attention; 
but also the details of the scene depicted by the 
prophet will amplify his own treatment of the 
modern situation, and the depth and tragedy and 
spiritual earnestness of the ancient Scripture 
will carry him further in his portrayal of the con- 
temporary danger than he would otherwise be 
taken. And against that striking background of 
twilight he will present more effectively Christ 
as the Light of life. 

Or he wishes to stir his people to a sense of 
civic obligation for the town in which they dwell. 
Instead of treating the subject as a topic, sup- 
pose he takes as a text the words with which the 
first evangelist brings Jesus back to Capernaum: 
“He came unto His own city.” It was not the 
city of His birth, or of His patriotic aspiration; 
it was the town in which He found it most con- 
venient to live in order to do His work—the 
practical motive which governs most dwellers in 
modern towns. That gives the sermon a begin- 


18 WHAT TO PREACH 


ning which few men would have hit on for them- 
selves. Then the preacher studies Jesus’ civic 
service in Capernaum:—His immediate enlist- 
ment in its organized religion in the synagogue, 
His willingness to help in the house where He 
was a lodger (an obligation frequently over- 
looked), His accessibility to the calls of the city’s 
needy, His going after those neglected by the 
religious folk—the publican Levi and his friends. 
Obviously what Jesus did in ancient Capernaum 
does not exhaust a modern citizen’s responsibili- 
ties, and the preacher will not be confined to pre- 
cedents stated in the Gospel narrative, but will 
point out what one with the conscience of Jesus 
will undertake in a city today. But the text and 
its context will have opened up some vistas the 
preacher might not have seen, and, starting with 
the example of Jesus, he will be kept to the same 
exalted ethical level throughout. 

Or the preacher may have in mind that rela- 
tively large class today, particularly among uni- 
versity students and our more intelligent older 
folk, who having heard that religion is an expe- 
rience, and, not having passed through any emo- 
tional crises and lacking the mystic sense, con- 
clude that they possess no first-hand touch with 
the living God. Such persons occasionally come 
to a minister, asking, as a recent graduate of 


EXPOSITORY, PREACHING 19 


Harvard came and asked me, “to put him next.” 
He was a youth from a high-principled and 
reservedly devout family, who was_ himself 
patently loyal to truth, responsive to the beauti- 
ful, and keen of conscience. When he asked to 
be “put next,” what could one reply but to ask 
him: ““Have you ever got away from God, who is 
Truth and Beauty and Righteousness?” That 
conversation suggested a sermon to the numer- 
ous group of whom he was representative. His 
longing had been voiced by the patriarch of Uz: 
“Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!” and 
the question with which one wished to answer had 
been expressed in a psalmist’s discovery of the 
inescapableness of God: “Whither shall I flee 
from Thy presence?’ One could start from the 
modern instance and pass to these two classic 
expressions, and leave the two sentences to sum 
up and enforce the message. 

Or suppose the preacher is struck with the lack 
of seriousness with which many of his people are 
taking their own life with God, and the cen- 
soriousness with which they criticise other forms 
of Christian thought and devotion that they re- 
gard as innovations. And suppose he asks him- 
self where in the Bible is a similar situation faced, 
and he chooses for a text our Lord’s judgment 
upon the religious leaders of His time when He 


20 WHAT TO PREACH 


compares them to children playing at the serious 
pursuits of adult life: “Whereunto then shall I 
liken the men of this generation, and to what are 
they like? They are like unto children that sit in 
the market-place.” Again the text not only 
sums up in memorable fashion the evil to which 
he would call his people’s attention, but it also 
gives him his theme—“Playimg at Religion”— 
and supplies him with several angles of attack 
upon the situation of which he probably would 
not otherwise have thought, and furnishes him 
with the word “childish” with which to rub in 
(and rubbing in is necessary for a malady of this 
sort) his remedy. 


I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made of 


platinum 
Because if I use leaden ones, his hide is sure to 
flatten ’em. 


Or the preacher may be eager to give the 
many painfully restricted persons among his 
hearers a Christian attitude towards their limita- 
tions. Suppose he commences with the half-piti- 
ful, half-triumphant message with which St. 
Paul closes his letter to the Colossians: “Remem- 
ber my bonds.” What does the recollection of 
the apostle’s bonds suggest in our handling of 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING | 21. 


ours? To begin with we shall be sure that they 
are genuine fetters and not elastic bands capable 
of being stretched by sufficiently resolute wrists. 
How marvellously Paul stretched the limitations 
of his Jewish upbringing and education! How 
skilfully he contrived to overleap barriers which 
would have seemed insuperable to others! Sec- 
ond, we shall accept our bonds as divinely ap- 
pointed. Paul calls himself the prisoner of 
Christ. Third, we shall think not so much of 
what we are bound from as of what we are bound 
to. No doubt limitations are often mercies in 
keeping us from courses where we might be im- 
perilled; but they are also always guides to 
divine duties. Paul’s confinement which cut him 
off from travel, shut him in to write some of his 
most enriching letters. Does not remembering 
Paul’s bonds afford us a very complete interpre- 
tation of the Christian treatment of limitations? 

A. text seems to me to have three uses:— 

(1) It keeps a preacher in line with the his- 
toric spiritual past which he is seeking to con- 
tinue. If within the ample range of the Biblical 
literature a preacher cannot find a text for what 
he wishes to say, the chances are that he is deviat- 
ing from the historic faith of which he is a 
teacher. 

(2) It sums up in striking and memorable 


22 WHAT TO PREACH 


form the main point of his message. If his peos 
ple carry away the text, they will have the 
essence of the sermon. 

(3) It almost invariably enriches the sermon 
from the wealthy life with God in the Bible with 
suggestions which were not in the preacher’s 
mind before. 

Many of our sermons first occur to us through 
texts. very preacher will do well to keep a 
note-book beside his Bible, and set down in it 
texts which reach out their hands from the pages 
of the Scriptures as he reads and lay hold on his 
mind and conscience. Let him give them a title, 
indicate whatever points in their treatment come 
to him at the time, and especially note any illus- 
trations they suggest. A well-filled note-book of 
that sort will prevent him from wasting the early 
part of a week in hunting for a subject and a 
text, and enable him to begin his preparation 
promptly on a ‘Tuesday morning. Further, sub- 
jects and texts have a way of not coming to us 
when we most eagerly look for them, but arrive 
unexpectedly in the leisure of our vacations or in 
the midst of our thoughts when we are busy at 
something else. They also have a way of vanish- 
ing inte oblivion unless we enter them, and enter 
them at once, in some place where we can put our 
hand on them. 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 23 


We would not make it a hard and fast rule that 
a sermon must commence with a text.) For va- 
riety’s sake it 1s well to preach occasionally 
without one, or to lead up to the text with an 
introductory paragraph—a very effective method 
if one starts with something contemporary and 
of immediate interest and links it with an historic 
religious experience—or the text may come as 
the climax rather than as the starting-point of 
the sermon. A preacher may omit a text not be- 
cause he wishes to be unhampered by Scripture, 
but because he proposes to traverse more Scrip-. 
ture that can be conveniently found in a brief 
passage. He may be speaking on loyalty, and 
illustrate the theme by three Old Testament 
heroines:—the maiden who remains stedfast 
to her peasant lover when tempted to enter 
Solomon’s palace—the heroine of one or more of 
the poems in the Song of Songs; Ruth faithful to 
a family obligation; Esther risking her life for 
the sake of her imperilled people. The three 
women embody three perennial loyalties:—to 
plighted troth, to kinsfolk, to fellow-country- 
men. None of them is outspokenly religious; 
Ruth changes her god for the sake of her mother- 
in-law and in the Book of Esther God is not 
once named; but religion in all three instances is 
the atmosphere in which the loyalty is grown and 


24 WHAT TO PREACH 


blossoms and fruits in noble fidelity. This is 
surely Scriptural preaching, although the con- 
vention of a text is dispensed with. 

Nor will preaching upon texts chosen here 
and there open up in systematic fashion the 
wealth of religious experience enshrined in the 
Bible. In planning the work of a year let a 
preacher take a consecutive course or, better, sev- 
eral courses (for there is much to be said for not 
prolonging unduly one line of exposition, and 
eight or ten serial sermons are as a rule enough 
of one type of subject); and let him treat with 
some completeness the contents of a book, or the 
characters of a particular epoch or group, or the 
teaching of a prophet or an apostle. For ex- 
ample, suppose he selects St. Paul’s circle of 
friends—a not infrequently treated subject— 
and a rich one, for it introduces us to men and 
women of varied ages and gifts and stations in 
life who served Christ in the formative day of 
Fis Church’s history. ‘The preacher will sketch 
how the friendship began, what experiences were 
shared, what each friend brought to the other 
and what together they accomplished for the 
cause of Christ. Such a course takes a congrega- 
tion through several tracts of Paul’s letters and 
of the Book of Acts rarely used as texts, fur- 
nishes them with vivid pictures of the personal 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 25 


relations among those who led the first mission- 
ary campaigns, renders much more human and 
lovable the apostle whose writings sometimes 
seem to them abstract and involved, and above 
all reveals what comradeship may mean among 
those who share the faith and purpose of Christ 
and with whom He is Himself a present and 
controlling Friend. 

Or suppose he arranges courses, as hosts of his 
predecessors have, in the questions which are 
asked on the pages of the Gospels. I say these 
are not novel courses, and indeed why should a 
preacher seek novelty when there is so much 
ignorance of the contents and meaning of the 
Bible, and the well-worn highways serve to show 
where preachers have found the most rewarding 
material? The cult of novelty in the pulpit may 
easily deprive a congregation of the great staple 
experiences of the Christian faith. Let a man 
look at the familiar passages with his own eyes, 
and interpret them in the light of his own obser- 
vation and experience, and they will come with 
sufficiently fresh meaning and power to hold his 
most seasoned hearers’ attention and win home 
to their hearts and consciences. And there is 
something about the direct questions recorded 
by the evangelists which make them peculiarly 
pointed texts and unerring guides to the essen- 


26 WHAT TO PREACH 


tials of Christian thought and life. One must 
never forget that the gospels are history written 
from Christian experience to produce Christian 
experience. Questions play a large role in the 
life of the spirit of man. 

There is a wealthy course of sermons in the 
questions put to Jesus: “Why hast Thou thus 
dealt with us?” “Comest Thou to me?” “Art 
Thou He that should come, or look we for 
another?” “Are there few that be saved?” 
“What lack I yet?’ “Whence should we have 
so many loaves in a desert place?” “Why could 
we not cast it out?” “Goest Thou thither 
again?” “How long dost Thou hold us in sus- 
pense?” “Lord, what is come to pass that Thou 
wilt manifest Thyself unto us and not unto the 
world?’ How patently these questions, those 
from the more objective synoptists no less than 
those from the Fourth Gospel, voice recurring 
spiritual problems! How directly they lead a 
preacher to handle vital personal religion— 
something from which many ‘preachers all too 
frequently get away. What ample material of 
the first LPOG lies at his disposal for the 
sermon in Jesus’ answer! / 

There is an even more heart-searching course 
in the questions put by Jesus: “How is it that 
ye sought Me? Wist ye not?” “Why are ye 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING ~ 27 


fearful?” “How long shall I bear with you?” 
*“Wouldest thou be made whole?’ “Seest thou 
aught?” “Sayest thou this of thyself?’ “Why 
callest thou Me good?” and the question He 
wished them to put: “None of you asketh Me, 
Whither goest Thou?” Expository preaching 
runs a risk of seeming to deal with the past; but 
the questions on Jesus’ lips seem spoken today. 
They would probably not have found a place on 
the pages of the evangelists had they not kept 
sounding in some disciple’s memory as His un- 
seen Master still dealt with him. They remain 
phrases through which He seems to deal imme- 
diately with us now. 

Or take a course in the questions asked con- 
cerning Jesus: “Whence hath this Man these 
things?’ “Why troublest thou the Master any 
further?” “Who then is this?’ “What sayest 
thou of Him?” “Wherefore would ye hear it 
again? Would ye also become His disciples?” 
“Whither will this Man go that we shall not find 
Him?” “What think ye? that He will not come 
to the feast?” (A text by the way which readily 
lends itself to a Communion Sermon.) The 
questions quoted only begin to open up these 
fruitful veins of ore. There is material for at 
least a half-dozen courses in Gospel questions 
and answers. 


28 WHAT TO PREACH 


When a preacher attempts to take up the con- 
tents of one of the longer books, he is often at a 
loss to know how to divide the material into por- 
tions which can be profitably handled in a single 
sermon. Neither the editors of the historical 
books nor the writers of epistles moved from 
topic to topic with clear and proportionate chap- 
ters. The preacher must analyse the book, set 
down the ideals or convictions illustrated and the 
main subjects dealt with, discard those which 
seem to have less present value, and select a 
number of salient points. In the historical books 
he may follow Thomas Carlyle’s method and 
concentrate upon the characters. These are 
happily sketched for a preacher’s purpose, not 
often with an attempt to appraise their signifi- 
cance for Israel’s development or to offer an 
unprejudiced judgment of their abilities or 
achievements, but as ideals of piety and virtue to 
be emulated or as types of faithlessness to be 
shunned. In the epistles there are lines of rea- 
soning more cogent to first-century readers than 
to us, and some topics are handled that will seem 
remote to a modern congregation. Expository 
preaching can be made dull by the man who does 
not know how to omit. There are some chapters 
where a subordinate point is of more practical 
present interest than the apostle’s main line of 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 29 


thought. For example, in First Corinthians, 
when Paul writes of marriage and divorce and 
remarriage, he is scarcely on the level of his own 
highest ideals, and this is not an inspiring Scrip- 
ture from which to draw for our congregations 
the Christian conception of wedded love. But it 
is a most suggestive chapter from which to study 
St. Paul’s view of his own authority and assur- 
ance as an interpreter of the mind of God. He 
carefully distinguishes three degrees of authority 
in what he writes :—that for which he can give the 
warrant of Jesus’ explicit teaching, that which 
he states on his own authority and of which his 
Christian conscience makes him very sure, and 
that which he offers merely as his deliberately 
arrived-at opinion. There is perhaps no better 
chapter from which to point out the degrees of 
authority which the writers of the Bible them- 
selves recognised and the consequent folly of 
placing all Scripture on the same plane. One 
may deal merely incidentally with the subject of 
marriage, frankly granting the apostle’s limit- 
ations, due perhaps to the character of those to 
whom he was writing, and use this passage to 
exalt Christ as Lord of the Scripture, whose 
Spirit alone can guide us in its interpretation. 
But it is scarcely necessary for me to go more 
into detail in suggesting the expository treat- 


30 WHAT TO PREACH 


ment of the varied types of literature to be found 
in the Bible. Indeed, it seems impertinent for a 
preacher of any other land to offer advice to 
Scotsmen, for no preachers have surpassed your 
own in this field. “Time makes ancient good 
uncouth,” and no man can be a mere imitator of 
Bruce and Dods, of Denney and Sir George 
Adam Smith. Let me merely beg of you, not 
only for the sake of your own congregations, but 
for the sake of the rest of the English-speaking 
world, to continue their tradition, and to enrich 
your generation with such examples of scholarly 
and intensely practical exposition. 

My own country is in the throes of a belated 
theological controversy due to the persistence of 
an obsolete and unprotestant view of Biblical 
inerrancy. Like most controversies it has focused 
on a single point, the Virgin Birth of our 
Lord, which Fundamentalists hold to be essen- 
tial to a faith in His Divinity. Simple exposi- 
tory preaching, showing what the New Testa- 
ment teaches and where its emphasis lies, seems 
the corrective to this unscriptural exaggeration. 
Take the eight portraits of Christ in the New 
Testament Canon—that in the early preaching 
recorded in the first chapters of the Book of Acts, 
that of St. Paul, of St. Mark, of St. Matthew, 
of St. Luke, that in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING | 31 


in the Apocalypse and in the Fourth Gospel. 
Ask of each: Against what background does it 
paint Christ’s figure? What details of His career 
are portrayed? What are omitted? What are 
stressed? How does the writer account for 
Christ’s uniqueness? How does he relate Him 
to God? How does he connect Him with man? 
Where does he locate Him? What was the con- 
tribution of this portrait to faith when it was first 
given to the Church? What is its present worth 
for Christians? A congregation is frankly sur- 
prised to note the differences of these New Tes- 
tament pictures, astonished at the ommissions, 
puzzled perhaps at the Apocalyptic Christ or at 
the slighting of the earthly career of Jesus in the 
early preaching and in St. Paul, and made to see 
that features which any New Testament writer 
omitted cannot be exalted to a place of primary 
importance. It becomes apparent that in the 
New Testament there are four explanations of 
the origin of our Lord’s Divine power: the an- 
ointing with the Spirit at the Baptism, the mirac- 
ulous birth of the Spirit in the womb of the Vir- 
gin Mary, the spiritual ancestry reaching back 
in the one genealogy through David to Abraham 
and in the other to Adam “the son of God,” the 
eternal existence of the Word with the Father 
who became flesh or the Man from heaven exist- 


32 WHAT TO PREACH 


ing in the form of God who emptied Himself to 
assume a servant’s form and be made in the like- 
ness of fleshly men. One cannot argue too much 
from silence, but one may point out that no New 
Testament writer combines pre-existence and 
miraculous birth, which apparently were, to 
start with, two different explanations of our 
Lord’s uniqueness. And such a course should 
also make plain that all the portraits present a 
Divine Lord, that they agree in the manner of 
Spirit He is of and the life He offers sinning 
men, and in His transforming power as Saviour 
of the world. (The best corrective of wrong 
views of the Bible is to present the teaching of 
the Bible itself in its own proportions.> We 
should not be in the deplorable plight in which 
we find ourselves in the American churches to- 
day, with widespread ignorance of the contents 
of the Bible and this literalistic view of it as a 
divinely dictated volume, had we possessed more 
preachers who systematically taught their people 
from the Scriptures, availing themselves of cur- 
rent scholarship. 

Courses of sermons upon the contents of the 
Bible give a preacher an incentive to devote him- 
self to study and to master the best books on the 
particular section of the Scriptures which he is 
treating. They safeguard him from too subjec- 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 33 


tive preaching, forever looking within and writ- 
ing from his own soul, instead of exploring the 
larger social heritage of the Christian com- 
munity. ‘They enable him to be forehanded in 
his preparation, with some of his material ready 
several weeks or months in advance, and with 
a, theme on which he can proceed to make his out- 
line and write his notes as soon as he sits down to 
his desk Tuesday forenoon, should his other ser- 
mon not yet have taken shape in his mind. They 
will assure variety in his preaching, for they will 
lead him over a wide range of topics. What 
preacher, who gives a series of sermons on the 
Ten Commandments, for instance, is not taken 
to large tracts of duty to which he would never 
have thought of leading his people apart from 
the guidance of these ancient principles? Inci- 
dentally such courses will furnish him texts and 
material for many future sermons in necessarily 
discarded or cursorily handled passages, and in 
the related Scriptures which any part of the 
Bible thoroughly studied always suggests. 
Expository preaching is not without its 
dangers. One is that of seeming to be dealing i 
with the past rather than the present life of God 
in the world. Preachers are apt to start with the 
situation in the passage of Scripture. It is bet- 
ter to begin with something contemporary, and 


34 WHAT TO PREACH 


then relate that to the historic treatment of a 
similar matter in the Bible. For example, if one 
is preaching on the First Commandment, which 
sounds remote from modern life, for few persons 
think themselves liable to worship several divin- 
ities, he may begin: “Were this commandment 
being given today, it might read “Thou shalt 
have at least one God.’” 'This creates an assur- 
ance that the preacher is not concerned with 
ancient history. ‘Then, after a paragraph or two 
on the necessity of worshipping some God, the 
preacher can go on to show that, while nominally 
we recognise one only, we readily slip back into 
polytheism, acknowledging the God of love in 
the home and the God of selfishness in business, 
the God of comradeship among men of our own 
class or nation or race and a very different deity 
in our relations with those of another class or na- 
tion or race. 

At times a man may so employ an incident or 
saying in Scripture as to suggest from the very 
start that he is thinking of contemporary con- 
ditions. ‘Take such a scene as that where Ezekiel 
sees the elders turning their backs on the temple 
and worshipping the sun. That can easily be so 
handled as to make a congregation feel that the 
preacher is describing the cult of Naturalism to 
be found widely today among those reared to 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING | 35 


adore the spiritual God of conscience and of re- 
demption. Ora preacher may commence with the 
shipwreck in the 27th Chapter of Acts, and use 
Paul’s words to the centurion concerning the 
sailors, “Except these abide in the ship, ye can- 
not be saved,” to suggest at once that he has in 
mind the danger of some men’s leaving or being 
put off the ship today, and current discussions 
will aid his hearers to recognise what ship he is 
thinking of—the Church or an industry or 
an international fellowship. Whether he com- 
mences with a current situation or makes the 
Scripture passage an obvious interpretation of 
present conditions, the preacher must from the 
opening sentence convey the impression that he 
and his listeners are face to face with God in to- 
day. 

A second danger is discursiveness. Allusion 
has already been made to the difficulty to be 
found in the Biblical material. St. Paul’s mind 
goes off down side-tracks, and then returns to 
the main route of his argument. The editors of 
Old Testament books introduce unrelated mat- 
ters, and such a book as Isaiah or Jeremiah has 
no chronological or topical or any other order 
whatsoever. ‘The preacher who takes up a book 
and proceeds from sentence to sentence or from 
paragraph to paragraph is sure to ramble, for 


36 WHAT TO PREACH 


the Bible itself, in its present form, frequently 
rambles. The distinction often made between 
topical and textual sermons is invalid; a sermon 
should be both. It should have a subject, and, 
like every other artistic creation—picture or play 
or musical composition—it should obey the canon 
of unity. And it should be scriptural in that it 
finds the subject’s classic statement or illustra- 
tion in the volume which is the standard of God’s 
life with men. Suppose the preacher, like thou- 
sands of his predecessors, be placing side by side 
the narratives of Babel and of Pentecost, his sub- 
ject is obviously “Causes of Discord and of 
Unity.” Let him stick to that theme throughout, 
and comment on no detail of either incident which 
does not bear directly upon it. Or he is trying to 
cover the career and message of a prophet in a 
series of sermons. Let him group the material 
under his own captions: Isaiah the Preacher, the 
Poet, the Statesman, the Theologian, the Herald 
of Hope. The Biblical writers were not think- 
ing of the convenience of preachers who should 
use their literary output. ‘They have left us a 
quarry whence we must select the stones we need 
and, shaping them for ourselves, build them into ~ 
an edifice of convictions and ideals for the spirits 
of the men of our time. 

A. third danger is lack of directness. A 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING ~ 37 


preacher may feel that an adequate and objec- 
tive statement of the Biblical teaching makes its 
pointed application to his hearers impossible. 
But the preacher must never be lost in the histo- 
rian. Suppose he is handling the little appended 
parable of the guest who entered the marriage 
feast without providing himself with a wedding 
garment. It is possible to go off into details of 
Palestinian marriage festivities in the First Cen- 
tury, and amplify them with anecdotes from more 
recent travellers in the Holy Land, or to discuss 
the religious tendencies of Jesus’ time and deter- 
mine what group He may have had in mind when 
He spoke. Let the preacher ask himself: Of 
what sort of man was Jesus thinking? ‘Thought- 
less—he went in without considering to what he 
was invited; self-assured—confident that in any 
clothes he would grace the occasion; distrustful— 
not really believing that he was invited to a royal 
marriage-feast, and so not seriously making the 
requisite preparations. Let him drive home those 
three points of thoughtlessness, self-assurance, 
and distrust of the Gospel, in men’s treatment of 
God’s gracious invitation today. 

Or the preacher may feel that he must be both 
an objective historical expositor and a teacher of 
living religion. So he devotes the first part of his 
discourse to a dispassionate statement of the Bib- 


38 WHAT TO PREACH 


lical teaching in the light of the thought of its 
day, and the second part to an application of it 
to present conditions. This method is occasion- 
ally justified, indeed is sometimes unavoidable; 
but it does not make the most effective preaching. 
It is a combination of a lecture on Biblical theol- 
ogy, not very gripping to the average congrega- 
tion, and of a brief homily delivered when the in- 
terest of the hearers has been dulled, if not com- 
pletely lost. The truth should be applied as one 
goes along, and applied from the first paragraph 
to the last. ‘This need not be done by direct ex- 
hortations or appeals, although these have their 
place, but the people should always be aware that 
the preacher is speaking of the living God in 
His immediate dealings with His children. 

A. fourth difficulty lies in the treatment of the 
miraculous. Most of us believe in a God who sur- 
prises us by doing wondrous things, so that we 
cannot confine Him within man’s discoveries of 
His usual ways. But we realize that in Bible 
days men’s outlook upon nature and history was 
so different from ours that we cannot accept their 
explanations of occurrences as identical with our 
own. Some preachers discard altogether pas- 
sages in which the miraculous is prominent on the 
ground that they do not feel intellectually honest 
in employing them. Others use them, but give 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 39 


the impression of being ill at ease with them. 
Others, again, to the bewilderment of some of 
their hearers, use them as though they were han- 
dling a matter-of-fact modern history. The pul- 
pit is usually not the place to deal with the ques- 
tion of the historicity of any Biblical narrative. 
That can be done, when necessary, more wisely 
in a less formal meeting where there can be dis- 
cussion and the give and take of question and an- 
swer. In any case the preacher is not urging his 
hearers to attempt to reproduce the miraculous 
experience in its literal form, but he is trying to 
state the spiritual principle, illustrated in the 
Biblical account, and to induce his listeners to 
live by it. No preacher, for instance, wishes his 
congregation to seek a repetition of the multipli- 
cation of the loaves and fishes; but he is eager 
for them to believe that when available resources, 
however meagre, are placed at Christ’s disposal, 
they are marvellously used to meet human need. 
He finds the details of the gospel accounts all 
helpful as illustrations of the working out of this 
essential principle. 

This treatment of the miraculous is as old as 
the New Testament itself—witness our Fourth 
Gospel. This evangelist has in his tradition, for 
example, the raising of Lazarus from the grave. 
Doubtless he found no difficulty with it as historic 


40 WHAT TO PREACH 


fact; but in his use of it he is obviously not inter- 
ested in proving the fact, but in citing it to pre- 
sent Christ as the resurrection and the life. The 
modern preacher may not feel that he knows ex- 
actly what lies behind the tradition in many of 
the Biblical miracles, but he knows that genera- 
tions of believers have tested the spiritual laws 
which these narratives illustrate in the world-view 
of their day, and illustrate with incomparable viv- 
idness and power. Let him use them for that 
purpose, and make plain in his treatment of them 
that this is his dominant aim. The historic ques- 
tion of what actually happened and exactly how 
it happened will not be raised because it is lost 
in the religious question of finding an all-suffi- 
cient God for our present necessities, and working 
with Him for their fulfilment in accordance with 
our conceptions of His ways in nature and the 
soul of man. 

The emphasis of this lecture upon expository 
preaching may seem to some a survival from a 
_ day when the Bible was viewed quite differently. 
- than we regard it now. One learns that even 
crude and fantastic doctrines are not to be thrown 
aside as worthless, but considered exaggerations 
of a truth to be remembered. But for that they © 
would not have thriven and commanded the alle- 
giance of devout and thoughtful Christians. Our 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING | AL 


present conception of the Bible surely does not 
render it any the less the spiritually selected and 
spiritually approved literary record of God’s pro- 
gressive Self-disclosure in that history which cul- 
minated in Christ and the founding of the 
Church, and which abides, when read under the 
guidance of Christ’s Spirit, the standard of faith 
and life. Every book in it is a survivor from a 
rigorous struggle, and lives on because genera- 
tion after generation of God-seekers find through 
it fellowship with Him and are found through it 
by Him. Our historical criticism enables us to 
appreciate the variety of spiritual experience 
which has found expression in these manifold 
literary forms. Here is just the assorted material 
we need for the heterogeneous spiritual types to 
whom we try to preach. The relatively greater 
freedom with which we handle the Bible, not hes- 
itating to distinguish sub-Christian from Chris- 
tian elements, less and more valuable religious ex- 
periences enshrined in this volume, and to dis- 
criminate between the religious experience and 
the form in which it is pictured, enables us to 
use each for what it is worth and to make these 
ancient discoveries of God accessible to modern 
men and women. The longer one lives with the 
Bible and the further one penetrates its heights 
and depths and lengths and breadths, and the 


42 WHAT TO PREACH 


longer one uses it as the source whence to draw 
inspirations for the spiritual transformation and 
upbuilding of those committed to him, the more 
one appreciates its exhaustless and perennially 
vital supplies. 

We have been speaking of expository preach- 
ing as though the preacher’s function were to in- 
terpret the Bible; we might more truly say that 
it is to interpret life by the Bible.» Recall Peter’s 
expository sermon at Pentecost. Here were 
men undergoing a novel and overwhelming ex- 
perience. How explain it? “This is that which 
hath been spoken through the prophet Joel.” 
The ancient Scripture makes plain the contem- 
porary experience: “This is that.” So the Bible 
throws light on all that befalls men, on tempta- 
tion and sin and pain and loss and death, on love 
and friendship and success and far-flying hope, 
on the mysterious comings to us and dealings with 
us from the vast Beyond or the depths Within. 

A. preacher who has faced a congregation at 
least twice on a Sunday for more than a quarter 
of a century, with few intervening weeks in which 
he was not confronted with several groups to be 
taught the things of the Spirit, often grows tired 
of his own mind with its stale and pathetically re- 
stricted range of thought, only occasionally finds 
contemporary books and associates spiritually 


EXPOSITORY PREACHING 43 


enriching, and again and again feels himself men- 
tally bankrupt. And here are these importunate 
and expectant friends on their puzzling and 
straining journey through the world rapping at 
his door, and he with nothing to set before them. 
Happily he has the food and drink of these be- 
lievers of the olden time, food and drink which 
thousands through the centuries have found nour- 
ishing and refreshing. Let him confidently turn 
to the Bible, and make himself an appetizing 
purveyor of its bread and wine of God. 

We began with a plea for the much-abused 
scribe. ‘The scribe came into disrepute because 
men felt that he lacked that glowing personal re- 
ligious experience which empowered the prophet. 
No man can interpret a scripture save as he 
shares in some degree the experience which the 
scripture enshrines. In our American railway 
stations there is a functionary who with the aid of 
a megaphone announces outgoing trains, naming 
their destinations and stops and the track where 
they may be boarded. On an oppressive summer 
day one will hear the announcer in a city termi- 
nal calling to the waiting travellers the enticing 
names of mountain and seaside resorts and sum- 
moning them to entrain, But the announcer him- 
self will stay in the sweltering station, without 
glimpse of forest or ocean, without a breath of 


AA WHAT TO PREACH 


their quickening air, and his lifelong he will not 
likely visit more than half a dozen of the places 
which he mentions glibly several times a day. 
God forbid that you and I should spend our lives 
telling the experiences of prophet and law-giver, 
psalmist and sage on the heights of vision and in 
the secret places of comfort and of power, and 
the experiences of disciples in the presence of in- 
carnate God, and be ourselves strangers to the 
everlasting hills, and aliens to the heart and con- 
science of Jesus Christ. 


LECTURE II 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 





LECTURE II 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 


THE preacher who would teach religion must 
give his people’an interpretation of God’s life 
with men; he must preach doctrine. » For a gen- 
eration or longer there has been a widespread 
complaint against theology in the pulpit; and 
preachers have yielded to the clamour with 
disastrous results. We have an ill-informed 
Church, often ignorant of, and groping after, fel- 
lowship with the Invisible. The cry has been: 
“Give us practical sermons, not theology.” But 
nothing is so practical as doctrine of the right 
kind. Back of all our helps to healthy and capa- 
ble living—inoculations which immunise from 
disease, a synthesis of chemicals which yields a 
dye or a new metal, the structure of a craft that 
navigates the air—lie correct interpretations of 
the forces of which our world is built up. Such 
interpretations are never regarded as final; they 
are revised and amplified from time to time, with 
resultant improvements in the applications made 
of them for utilitarian ends. Explanations of the 


spiritual universe—of God and His purpose, His 
47 


48 WHAT TO PREACH 


redeeming love, His empowering presence, of 
man and his temptations, his sin, his salvation, his 
reinforcements, his discipline, his destiny, are of 
even more value for vigorous and victorious life. 
Such explanations are never final or complete, 
but they confer inestimable gifts and graces. 
We agree today that theology and religion are 
not identical, that religion precedes and is far 
more important than theology, and that doctrines 
are man’s attempts, always provisional, to ration- 
alise his experiences of God. But it is also true 
that theology enriches religion, that expectation 
makes possible experience, and that to teach doc- 
trine which sets forth what God is and does opens 
doors into ampler life with Him. St. Paul found 
a group of earnest men at Ephesus who were 
followers of John the Baptist, but knew nothing 
of the possession of the Spirit. Their expecta- 
tion restricted their experience; their meagre the- 
ology limited their religion. When he explained 
to them Jesus and the Spirit given to believers 
in Him, their life was enlarged. Their new ex- 
perience at once found expression, and charac- 
teristic First Century expression, for there are 
fashions in religious forms: “They spake with 
tongues and prophesied.” ‘That incident may 
serve for an introductory sermon in a course on 
Christian doctrine. For are there not many in 


, 


— 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 49 


our time like these men baptised into John’s bap- 
tism? Religion to them means an effort to do 
good and to be good. A favourite text is James’ 
statement of pure religion: “to visit the widows 
and fatherless in their affliction and to keep one’s 
self unspotted from the world.” ‘They forget 
that James begins: “Pure religion and undefiled 
before our God and Father.’ He would have 
no sympathy with the godless religion at pres- 
ent common. Religion is primarily neither doing 
good nor being good, but being connected with 
Someone with whom we do far better things and 
become far better men and women than is possi- 
ble by ourselves. A preacher must teach what 
Christian fellowship with the Unseen is, what be- 
lievers find in their relations with God, how com- 
munion with Him is established and maintained. 

That is doctrinal preaching; and it should 
form a large part annually of a minister’s pulpit 
teaching. There are not a few thinking persons 
who stay away from church services on the 
ground that, when they attend, they learn 
nothing. We are surfeited with what are termed 
“inspirational sermons’—exhortations with a 
maximum of heat and a minimum of light. They 
are popular with that large number of people 
who are mentally sluggish and fancy that they 
do not wish to be made to think, and who enjoy 


50 WHAT TO PREACH 


being warmed up to their more arduous duties. 
As a matter of fact, many of them discover that 
thinking is a delightful exercise when they are 
pushed to it. Although usually unaware of it, 
they want instruction, and a most sorely needed 
element in that instruction is an interpretation 
of God’s relations with and reinforcements of 
man. Cults, like Christian Science, owe their 
vogue in large measure to their teaching of con- 
nections to be made with Life and Goodness be- 
yond man’s own, and their specific teaching of 
how these may be established, with a technique of 
intercourse with the Infinite. Roman Catholi- 
cism instructs its adherents in the dogmas and 
requirements of that Church, so that even the 
very ignorant among them have some distinct be- 
’ liefs. Protestant Christendom is suffering from 
vagueness in its thought of religion, from lack of 
positive convictions and ideals. Doubtless at this 
point a religion of spiritual freedom is apt to be 
at a disadvantage with a religion of external au- 
thority. We Protestant preachers have a diffi- 
cult task in teaching doctrine, for we must think 
out for ourselves in terms of our time an interpre- 
tation of our spiritual heritage, and help our peo- 


ple to a like intellectuai effort. But thinking for ~ 


one’s self has always been the glory of Protestant 
Christians and is surely the obligation of adult 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 51 


sons and daughters of God. Part, and no small 
part, of the object of our public worship is to 
make us think. Dr. Lyman Beecher wrote to 
one of his sons: “Have one sermon a week that 
will tax your intellect and the intellect of your 
hearers.” And Horace Bushnell told a company 
of divinity students: “There cannot be much 
preaching worthy of the name where there is no 
thinking. Preaching is nothing but the bursting 
out of light, which has first burst in or up from 
where God is, among the soul’s foundations.” 
The complaints against doctrinal preaching’ 
are really protests against faulty or dull methods 
of presenting the great Christian convictions. 
The pulpit is often a generation behind theologi- 
cal lecture-rooms, and even where ministers hold 
a modern view of the Bible, we find some of them 
still deducing doctrine from proof-texts of Scrip- 
ture. They do not attempt to get at the experi- 
ence which the Biblical writers were trying to 
interpret in the forms of thought current in their 
day, and to make clear that we share their ex- 
perience, and, like them, must explain it in ways 
congruous with our own thinking. They do not 
discriminate between those Biblical terms which 
we can still employ or adapt, and those which do 
not fit into present conceptions of the universe. 
_ Suppose a preacher is following the main fes- 


52 WHAT TO PREACH 


tivals of the Christian Year (a most valuable 
practice compelling him to treat annually the 
main themes of the Christian revelation), and he 
comes to the Ascension of Christ. Here one has 
the Biblical conception of a flat earth with the 
heaven above it, and the levitation of our Lord, 
presumably in physical form, through a cloud 
into the skies to a place at God’s right hand. As 
poetry this is picturesque, and one feels it not in- 
appropriate in hymns for ascensiontide. But 
treated as prose, it is impossible for any thought- 
ful man. A preacher must point out that Jesus 
had made such an impression upon those who 
knew Him that they felt that no place in the 
universe was too exalted for Him. ‘They had 
become aware of His intimacy with God, and 
were sure that where God is and whatever He is 
doing, there also Jesus shares His life and work. 
They pictured God as enthroned in the skies and 
as dwelling in believing hearts. They could not 
think of Jesus as separate from Him. He was 
enthroned above all worlds. He was in closest 
comradeship with His loyal followers. One need 
not dwell on the differences between the Biblical 
thought and our own, and certainly one ought not 
to speak in superior fashion of theirs as childish. 
Our view of the universe will seem crude a cen- 
tury hence; but one must bridge the interval be- 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 53 


tween First Century thought and ours by carry- 
ing over the abiding conviction of the lordship of — 
Jesus. ‘Then one may go on to some meanings 
which the ascension had for them, which we also 
need :—It freed their thought of Jesus from local 
limitations and gave Him a cosmic setting ren- 
dering Him universal and contemporary. It 
Christianised their thought of God, for they con- 
ceived Him as doing nothing of which Jesus was 
not the willing partner. It made the universe 
more homelike, for there was no remotest spot in 
it where Jesus was not present and potent. It 
held up an ideal for the Church—to witness in 
its teaching and organisation and life to His su- 
premacy, and to bring the kingdoms of the world 
under His sway. 

Or suppose the preacher is ambitious enough 
to attempt to present in a single sermon a doc- 
trine of the Person of Christ. Here three ele- 
ments have to be considered :—history, faith and 
reflection. We have Christ as a fact in the 
world’s career, Christ as a force in believing 
hearts, Christ as a creed in Christian minds. The 
three headings may help to make clear where 
men may differ in their thought of Him and find 
themselves one in loyalty. And they may do 
something as well to banish some of the differ- 
ences. There is first the historic fact of this Life, 


54 WHAT TO PREACH 


which produced the religion of the New Testa- 
ment. Without discussing whether everything 
recorded of Jesus occurred exactly as it is re- 
ported (and what two reports of any occurrence 
today agree in all details or are accurate in every 
particular?), here is an indisputable basis in his- 
tory: Jesus of Nazareth was such an one as to 
create the religious impression of Him found in 
our New Testament. Each age selects from that 
impression what most appeals to it. Today we 
are likely to be caught by His singular intimacy 
with God, His singular character of unfailing 
love, His singular victory over the world and sin 
and death. But, second, Christ is never a fact 
to be studied dispassionately : He challenges all 
who approach Him to follow Him, and if we fol- 
low we find ourselves sharing His fellowship with 
the Unseen, adoring His character, drawing from 
His victory power to like triumphs. Here all 
Christians are at one in their experience of new 
life in Him. Then, third, we come to reflect on 
this experience and ask ourselves what it means. 
We cannot help using our own ways of thinking, 
but even so there is much in which the ten thou- 
sand times ten thousand of Christendom agree. 
We agree with Jesus Himself that He is God’s 
Son, in unique comradeship with the Invisible. 
We agree with His first interpreters that in Him 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 55 


we see manifest the God we worship and the Man 
each of us would fain become. We agree that 
He is the Saviour and Lord of life. There are 
questions which have been raised from the earliest 
times until now, questions of His origin, of the 
combination of Divine and human in Him, of the 
explanation of how His victory avails for us, 
which have been variously answered throughout 
the ages. They deserve study, but the devoutest 
and wisest Christians may disagree in answering 
them, and still find in Jesus the Representative of 
God, Himself the symbol of the Highest we wor- 
ship and the ideal we seek to follow, and Himself 
the Giver of power to conquer fear and evil 
and death. 

Such distinctions which discriminate between 
fact and interpretation, between religion and the- 
ology, are essential to helpful doctrinal preach- 
ing. 

A. second mistake is to deaden interest by em- 
ploying technical language, or language which 
has been worn threadbare. For example, Justi- 
fication by Faith is a grand, historic phrase which 
has practically no connotation to the average 
member of our congregations. We may use as 
a synonym Forgiveness, or Adjustment by 
_ Trust, and convey a considerable part of the his- 
toric inheritance, and clarify the main point which 


56 WHAT TO PREACH 


we are interested in stressing. Dr. Marcus Dods 
used to say that the principal words in the reli- 
gious vocabulary become so worn in time by 
usage as to lose their precise measures of spirit- 
ual value; and that they ought to be called in 
after a generation and withdrawn from circula- 
tion; after a lapse of years they might be reminted 
and reissued. ‘To speak of “original sin” does 
not mean much to our people, but the same thing 
is playing a phenomenal réle with our psycholo- 
gists under the label of the subconscious with its 
racial instincts or the libido, which, in the current 
jargon, must be “sublimated.” One is not say- 
ing that the contemporary vocabulary is one whit 
better than the old one; it often seems clumsier 
and less euphonious; but one cannot do business 
in a generation, any more than within the sov- 
ereignty of a nation, without exchanging our 
symbols of value for its own current coin. It is 
the preacher’s task to discover synonyms for the 
spiritual treasures which he has come to classify 
under their ancient denominations and put them 
in circulation in terms which at once suggest their 
worth. 

A. third method of doctrinal preaching open to 
objection starts either with the Scriptures or with 
the historic formulation, ‘and then proceeds to 
set forth its present significance and apply it to 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING | 57 


life under modern conditions. This is never as 
adroit and effective as to commence with living 
faith and interpret its implications. Suppose a 
preacher wishes to connect the Trinitarian con- 
ception of God with contemporary life and make 
plain that it conserves and interprets immediately 
valuable elements in the Church’s historic faith. 
He may begin with democracy, an ideal in which 
most of his hearers profess to believe, and ask, 
What is the religious faith on which our con- 
ception of democracy rests? A threefold faith— 
faith in the capacities of the common man, faith 
in the inherent and self-evidencing power of 
ideals, faith in the universe as friendly to human 
brotherhood. It is a faith which is lightly as- 
sumed by all our dreamers of and toilers for social 
progress. Is it justified? It is certainly open to 
challenge. Men, as we know them, are selfish 
and lazy and often very stupid. There are moods 
in which we are tempted to call them, with F'red- 
erick the Great, diese verdammte Rasse, or to 
speak of them, as Carlyle did of the population 
of Britain, as “mostly fools.” ‘The disillusion- 
ment which has supervened upon the Great War 
has led to cynicism and a disparagement of hu- 
manity. Nor do ideals appear to be immediately 
victorious. ‘The best of them are sure of re- 
peated defeat. Shrewd men of the world pooh- 


58 WHAT TO PREACH 


pooh them as too good to come true. And as for 
the universe, our human race is located upon one 
of the more diminitive planets in the illimitable 
regions of space, a planet where scientists tell 
us that for the time being the glaciers have re- 
treated, leaving the largest part of the globe hab- 
itable, but for which they also predict a return 
of the ice when the teeming millions of its dwell- 
ers will be pushed into ever narrower confines 
with a subsequent struggle for survival which will 


make any past war seem a trifling skirmish. Ul- | 


timately this planet is destined to be as cold and 
dead as the moon, and all the doings of its busy 
denizens will be buried beneath its thick frozen 
mantle and lost in oblivion. What incentive is 
there to labour for a perfected human society 


If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in 
vain, 

And the homeless planet at length will be wheel’d 
thro’ the silence of space, 

Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race, 


When the worm shall have writhed its last and — 


its last brother-worm shall have fled 
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the 
rocks of an earth that is dead? 


On what, then, can our faith in democracy be 


based? On the Christian God. We believe in 


, 


. 
5. 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 59 


the capacities of the common man, not because 
we find men so capable, but because a plain Man, 
a, carpenter, in a village in an obscure corner of 
the world of His day, a member of a subject race, 
embodied the fulness of God, and in Him all 
others, least, last and lowest, may be made full. 
We believe in the might of ideals akin to His, not 
because we see them everywhere triumphant; on 
the contrary they are despised and rejected, cru- 
cified and buried. But we do not consider them 
projections of man’s aspirations, but the Breath 
of the Almighty in man, destined to rise from the 
tombs where selfishness confines them and to con- 
quer by the very crosses to which they have been 
nailed. We believe that this universe is friendly 
to brotherhood, not because we dispute the sci- 
entists’ account of the evolution and probable 
destiny of our planet, but because for us its 
Creator and Lord is the God and Father of Jesus 
Christ, who is responsible for His children, and 
will see to it that here or somewhere else we all 
have enough and to spare, provided we work for 
it and share it after His just and loving will. 
And this threefold faith in God as incarnate in 
the Man Christ Jesus, as the Spirit inspiring 
Christian ideals, as the Father of our race and 
Controller of the universe, is summed up in the 
‘Trinity—Son, Spirit, Father, one living God. 


60 WHAT TO PREACH 


The preacher has begun with a current assump- 
tion, and interpreted the religious basis upon 
which it can rest. 

Or suppose the preacher wishes to present the 
character and power of God. It is a theme which 
needs frequent treatment, for a Christian concep- 
tion of God is by no means common and notions 
of His might are still allowed to efface His good- 
ness, or notions of His goodness are disconnected 
from His might. This topic is often handled by 
a brief survey of man’s thought of Deity from 
primitive times to the full-orbed disclosure in 
Jesus. Such perspectives of the development of 
the object of man’s worship may be instructive; 
but they assume more historical interest than 
most congregations possess, and they savour 
more of the lecture-room than of the pulpit. The 
preacher in the brief space allotted him wants to 
keep his hearers face to face with their greatest 
Contemporary. Suppose he begins by asking: 
If we could choose the God we think our world 
ought to have, what would He be like? He 
would be powerful enough to control it, and good 
enough to direct it to loving ends. Is not this 
the God whom Christianity offers us? See Him 
described in words put upon the lips of Jesus — 
by an evangelist in his account of the conversa- — 
tion in the Upper Room: “He that hath seen Me ~ 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 61 


hath seen the Father,” and “The Father is 
greater than I.” The Christian God is like Jesus 
and greater. Then let the preacher develop his 
two points—God’s Christlikeness with all that 
this means at the core of the universe and every 
touch of its life upon us; God’s greatness, com- 
prising that force and life and truth and beauty 
and goodness to which we are led along all the 
paths of our being, so that Christ defines but 
does not confine our thought of God, and ador- 
ing Him in Jesus we also with Jesus worship 
Him as Lord of heaven and earth. ‘The preacher 
starts with an acknowledged desire and shows 
how the God of Christian faith fully satisfies it. 

Some may think that both in the previous 
lecture and today too much regard is paid ta 
the start of a sermon. It has been part of the 
present lecturer’s annual duty now for many 
years to preach in University chapels where the 
attendance of undergraduates is required. One 
cannot take for granted an avid interest in one’s 
hearers, and obviously one must not be overlong. 
Mr. Hadley, the former president of Yale, used 
to say to the university preacher: “You may 
preach half an hour, but no souls are saved after 
twenty minutes.” To which I have replied: 
“One may keep on safely and savingly for haif 
an hour provided one nails down their attention 


GBs WHAT TO PREACH 


in the first minute.” The approach shot is mo- 
mentous. The late Dr. Sparhawk Jones, of Bal- 
timore and Philadelphia, was once preaching in 
the Princeton pulpit, and read for his text Haz- 
ael’s words to Elisha: “Is thy servant a dog that 
he should do this thing?’ He closed the Bible, 
and began: “Dog or no dog, he did it;”’ and pro- 
ceeded to preach upon the superiority of first to 
second thoughts in moral decisions—the theme of 
Bishop Butler’s famous sermon on Balaam. 
That opening sentence gave him his listeners, and 
really gave them his message. One is not plead- | 
ing for the sensational, but for the arresting. 

<It is particularly necessary to have a ‘gripping 


start when one is going to make a congregation _ 


think hard on some august doctrine of the Chris- 
tian faith. 

Still another necessity is telling illustration. 
Doctrinal sermons, more than any other kind of 
preaching, are liable to be heavy in language. 
It was to carry home His doctrine that Jesus em- 


ployed parables. They are packed with theol- — 


ogy, but theology in pictures. He found anal- 
ogies for the kingdom of God in soil and seed 
and leaven and in the doings of men. The 
preacher of doctrine must follow His method. — 
Take so abstract a theme as the Trinity of which — 
we were speaking a moment ago, and no matter — 





DOCTRINAL PREACHING 63 


how carefully a preacher picks simple words, his 
people will carry away little unless he packs his 
message into a simile. Of course the simile is 
no argument and must not be made to do duty 
for clear exposition. Nor must any simile be 
carried too far; the parables of Jesus, by press- 
ing their details, have been interpreted to mean 
what He never intended them to convey. But il- 
lustrate we must. Scientific discovery suggests 
one analogy to the religious discovery we try to 
express in the Trinity. In 1868 Sir Norman 
Lockyer, with the help of the spectroscope, dis- 
covered a new gas flaming up in certain parts of 
the sun, a gas unlike any known on earth, so he 
gave it the name of helium. In 1895 Sir Wil- 
liam Ramsay discovered the same element in 
some of the tubes with which he was conducting 
experiments in his laboratory, but it was consid- 
ered an extremely rare element. The Great War 
brought an urgent demand for a non-inflammable 
gas for use in airships, and helium was known 
to have this property. It was discovered in fairly 
large quantities in certain wells in Texas and in 
Utah, and 150,000 cubic feet of it were on the 
wharves in New York, awaiting shipment, when 
the Armistice was signed. Today it is in use in 
practically all the dirigible vessels which navi- 
gate the air. You have already caught the an- 


64 WHAT TO PREACH 


alogy. Men had discovered One unlike them- 
selves in holiness, the Most High. They spoke of 
Him as Divine or the Father in heaven in con- 
tradistinction to human and earthly. ‘Then in 
Jesus they found the Divine at their side, God in 
man, the heavenly moving abroad in the life of 
earth. When His bodily presence was with- 
drawn, they made the further discovery that the 
Divine, the Holy Spirit, was manifest in the cor- 
porate life of believers in Jesus, was an indwell- 
ing Presence with whom they could work and who 
worked in and through them mightily. 

Or if he be handling the Person of Christ, with 
its two aspects—the religious experience of the 
Man Jesus and the incarnation of God in Him— 
there is an analogy in the present scientific ex- 
planation of light. A few years ago we were 
taught that light consisted of waves moving in 
a hypothetical ether; light, as Lord Kelvin clev- 
erly put it, was “the nominative of the verb to 


undulate.” More recently it has been discov- _ 
ered that light exerts a pressure which can be — 


weighed, and we can speak of the number of tons 
of sunlight per annum received by our earth. 
This is very like Sir Isaac Newton’s emanation 
theory. Both theories seem to be needed to ac- 
count for light. Sir William Bragg writes: 


iis > jee oe ——s vans wa, hs 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 65 


On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we 
used the wave theory; on ‘Tuesdays, Thursdays 
and Saturdays we think in streams of flying 
energy, quanta or corpuscles. That is, after all, 
a very proper attitude to take. We cannot state 
the whole truth, since we have only partial state- 
ments, covering a portion of the field. When we 
want to work in any one portion of the field or 
other, we must take out the right map. Some day 
we shall piece all the maps together. 


So Jesus is to us at times a Man like ourselves 
receiving by faith fellowship with God, and at 
times the embodiment of God Himself in whose 
pressure upon our life we feel the Heart and 
Conscience of the Eternal. 

A picturesque text may be of great assistance, 
and you have surely noted already that doctrinal 
preaching is not being set over against expository 
preaching. If a preacher be handling the sup- 
posedly most speculative doctrine of the Trinity, 
he might set out with the text: “Lord, Thou hast 
been our dwelling-place in all generations.” The 
word “dwelling” is suggestive. One never knows 
what a house is like until one lives in it. One 
never knows what God is like until one lives in 
Him. Probably God never seemed home to His 
children until they discovered that He is one 


66 WHAT TO PREACH 


and friendly. Ask a Korean Christian, with his 
background of devil worship, what most appeals 
to him in his new faith, and he will almost surely 
say: “That I have to do with one God only and 
that He is good.” Then let the preacher stress 
the Divine unity, for (as was said last time) we 
are still unwittingly polytheists, and the Chris- 
tian doctrine of the Trinity in Unity has always 
been a protest against polytheism. We cannot 
worship Truth in science and Tradition in reli- 
gion; we cannot adore Service in the home and 
Success in the market-place. The basic article in 
the ancient faith of Israel must still be fundamen- 
tal in our doctrine of God: “Hear, O Israel, the 
Lord thy God is one Lord.” But men who had 
been brought up in that one friendly spiritual 
home, when they met Jesus, found Him so much 


more truly at home in the Unseen that they asked | 


Him: “Master, where dwellest Thou?” and He 
answered: “Come, and ye shall see.” One can- 
not know what Jesus’ spiritual home is like until 
one lives with Him. When Andrew and Philip 
lived with Jesus, what did these disciples see? 
They saw above Him and them a Father’s care 
and companionship. They prayed with Him: 
“Our Father, Thy will be done.” Then, after 
Jesus had lived with them and died and risen, 
they saw this Father unveiled in Him, and one 


a 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING _ 67 


of them called Jesus: “My Lord and my God.” 
Then they found that the Spirit of their Home 
had got into them and was their life. That is 
not surprising; for is not that exactly what hap- 
pens in all homes? A child begins by being reg- 
ulated by his father and mother; then he passes 
on to imitate them; then, when perhaps they are 
no longer at hand, their spirit lives on in him, af- 
fecting his decisions, governing his purposes, 
enriching his life. Regulation, imitation, in- 
spiration—we pass through all three and all 
three continue side by side as processes by which 
we children find ourselves influenced by God. 
The metaphor of the home interprets the expe- 
rience which the doctrine has formulated. One 
need not go off into speculations of the relations 
of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The 
preacher is concerned to bring his people into the 
dwelling-place of the devout generations, and 
point out what they will find in God. 

In religion this is a wistful age. It is acknowl- 
edged that man’s powers have outgrown his 
spirit, and there is a craving, often inarticulate, 
for enlargement of soul, and for that spiritual 
fellowship in which souls grow. A typical ex- 
pression of the age is heard in some letters, writ- 
ten a very few years ago by a former member of 
Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, the late Franklin K. 


68 WHAT TO PREACH 


Lane. He writes: “I am trying to get hold of 
something that might be called the shadow of a, 
religion—a God that has a good purpose, and 
another life in which there is a chance for growth, 
if not for glory. But when I bump up against a 
series of afflictions, I fall back upon a phi- 
losophy of a purposeless or else a cruel God. I 
_ simply have a sinking of the heart, a goneness, a 
hopelessness.” And again: “My God, how I do 
cling to what scraps of faith I have and put them 
together to make a cap for my poor head.” And 
still again, looking out on the problems of the 
day, he writes: “I do not believe that we shall 
change this world much for the good out of any 
materialistic philosophy or by any shifting of 
economic affairs. We need a revival—a belief in 
something bigger than ourselves and more last- 


1 


ing than the world.” Such a hungry but uni-" 


formed age needs to be told, as plainly and con- 
vincingly as a preacher can, what the Christian 
faith is; and its principal convictions ought to be 
set forth as though the hearers were listening to 
them for the first time, taking no knowledge for 
granted. From time to time let a minister give 
a course in the main doctrines, and state what we 
believe concerning religion, the Bible, Jesus 
Christ, God, man, sin, salvation, the new life indi- 
vidual and social, the Church, the future hope. 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 69 


Another fruitful line of teaching for this wist- 
ful day is to describe the results of Christian 
faith. Let the preacher handle the normal Chris- 
tian experience, and tell what believers discover 
in their fellowship with God in Christ :—refresh- 
ment, cleansing, power, illumination, fruitful- 
ness, buoyancy, adventure, unity, and the like. 
He will use the experience so richly available in 
the Scriptures, and he will supplement it from 
the treasures of Christian biography, and make 
it as contemporaneous as he can. We know that 
on the one hand there are not a few steady church- 
goers who seem to get very little satisfaction out 
of their nominal intercourse with the Unseen; 
and that on the other hand there are clamant crit- 
ical voices asserting that religion is illusion, God 
a projection of man’s childish wish to feel himself 
fathered in a lonely universe, and that the effect 
of religion upon its devotees is to render and 
keep them infantile. There is no better way of 
opening up their unsuspected and unused wealth 
to the one and of correcting the mistaken ideas 
of the other than by setting forth what Christian 
faith does for those who understand and employ 
it. 

Nor is any apologetic more persuasive. Show 
men results, and it is difficult for them to believe 
that they have no adequate cause, that the most 


70 WHAT TO PREACH 


prized spiritual gains are to be attributed to a 
mere phantasy. If they are wistful, it is likely 
that they will follow up the effects to see what is 
behind them and what accounts for them. Many 
of you are familiar with that romantic chapter in 
astronomy which records the discovery of the 
planet Neptune. In 1781 Sir William Her- 


schell had found the planet Uranus, and had — 


plotted the course which it would take for a num- 
ber of years to come. But as time went by as- 
tronomers saw that the planet was not moving as 
Sir William had predicted. ‘They re-examined 
his calculations, but could detect no error. So 
they concluded that some other globe, off in space 
beyond the reach of any of their telescopes, was 
deflecting Uranus from the orbit which it other- 
wise would pursue. ‘The British mathematician, 
Adams, and the Frenchman, Le Verrier, calcu- 
lated its probable location and size. In 1846 Sir 
John Herschell wrote of this mysterious body, 
unknown save for its effects: “We see it as Co- 
lumbus saw America from the shores of Spain. 
Its movements have been felt trembling along the 
far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty 
hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.” 
And before that year had elapsed, by means of 
an improved lens, the German astronomer, Galle, 
saw the planet Neptune, and found it almost ex- — 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING bv 


actly at the distance and of the dimensions which 
had been forecast. Here are lives undergoing 
certain experiences, deflected from some courses 
and held to others, who explain the constraint to 
which they respond as due to their relationship 
to the living God. He is invisible, and so beyond 
the processes of scientific demonstration. But to 
those who know His influence upon men, espe- 
cially those who know it upon themselves, He 
is no guess but the basic spiritual certainty. 

Still another useful approach is to take up the 
question, frequently put in a cynical tone by the 
incredulous, ““What difference does it make?” 
A preacher may examine a fairly wide range of 
life under such captions as: “What difference 
does Christian faith make in a man’s decision? 
in his ordeals? in his obligations? in his manners? 
in his resources? in his appreciations? in his 
hopes?’ Here again he can profitably use bio- 
graphical material from both Christian and non- 
Christian sources. Under the last heading what 
a contrast there is between the exquisite tribute 
which Clement of Alexandria pays to Jesus 
when he writes: “He has turned all our sunsets 
into sunrise,” and the conclusion of the recent 
autobiography of that extraordinarily versatile 
man, Sir Harry Johnston, artist, linguist, nat- 
uralist, public official, novelist, who having given 


72 WHAT TO PREACH 


over, if he ever possessed, the Christian point of 
view, writes: “There is just a hope, a faint strug- 
gling hope, that mankind, united in purpose, 
striving to create and maintain better and better 
control over this Planet, may stave off eventual 
annihilation, may even make itself (millions or 
billions of years hence) master of the solar sys- 
tem.” We do well to force men to face the is- 
sue:—Suppose the Christian faith be untenable, 
what is the prospect? what the principles on 
which life is to be lived? what the resultant char- 
acters and social relations to be looked for? Sup-— 
pose the Christian faith be true, what manner of 
men ought we to be? what are our responsibilities? 
our reinforcements? our outlooks? 

Or the same question may be put in connec- 
tion with specific Christian convictions:—What 
difference does it make whether a man believes - 
in the fatherhood of God? in the lordship of © 
Jesus? in the Holy Spirit? in the Christian view 
of man? in the cross? in prayer? in immortality? 
It is so common among the unthinking to hear 
the remark: “I don’t care what a man believes; 
his creed does not matter.” Men need to be 
wakened by being confronted with a stark pagan 
faith (and unhappily it is not in the least difficult 
to find it in current literature), and made to feel 
just what follows from that premise. Mr. Gals- 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING hone ds 


worthy makes one of his characters, a soldier, 
say as he dies: ““Waste no breath on me—you can- 
not help. Who knows—who knows? I have no 
hope, no faith; but I am adventuring. Good- 
bye.” Suppose the spiritual interpretation of 
life and death be false, what room is there for ad- 
venture? If we be so much dust, there will be 
little adventure in a cemetery. The young sol- 
dier’s language is a survival from a more believ- 
ing day. “Good-bye” is, disguised and con- 
tracted, ““God be with you.” We recover for the 
Christian faith something of the radiant glory in 
which it first burst upon our world and still breaks 
‘upon minds reared in the relative darkness of 
some other creed, when we present it in contrast 
with an opposing point of view. The literature, 
all too meagre, which comes from mission fields, 
is valuable for this purpose. There is illustrative 
‘material in the biographies of honest minds who 
have parted with the Christian faith in which 
they were brought up, and then describe the dif- 
: ference for them in their new creed. One of the 
‘most distinguished of the graduates of my own 
: alma mater, Yale College, the poet Edward Row- 
and Sill, was caught in the bewilderments which 
overtook many thoughtful minds in the 1860s and 
gave up a cherished ambition to enter the Chris- 
tian ministry. He confided in a letter to a friend: 





| 
| ; 


74 WHAT TO PREACH 


“People think that a thinking man’s specula- 
tions about religion interfere with his daily life 
very little—but how certain conclusions do take 
the shine out of one’s existence.” And on the 
other hand, one can explore the careers of those 
who were mastered by a mighty faith. Readers 
of Southey’s life of John Wesley will recall 
how upon its final page he sums up that forceful 
and fruitful personality: “He was a man of great 
views, great energies, and great virtues.” ‘The 
order is significant: great views accounted for 
the energies and the virtues. There is the reason 
for doctrinal preaching. Men need the views, 
great in love which give them a homelike feeling 
in this universe, great in wisdom which enable 
them to walk and work purposefully amid the 
tangle of circumstance, great in power which fur- 
nish them with all-sufficient supplies to master 
evil within and without and leave the world more 
Christlike for their service in it. » | 

Still another useful line of doctrinal preach- 
ing is to give the Christian attitude towards life’s 
happenings. One may entitle the course “A 
Christian Interpretation of Life,’ and let the 
series of sermons deal with the Christian View of 
Life, of the Earth in which we live, of Posses- 
sions, of Success and Failure, of Pain, of ‘Temp- 
tation, of Opportunity, of Burdens, of Pleasures, 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING a pt 6) 


of Death. The preacher starts in each case with 
the raw material of experience—experience in 
which for the most part men are unaware of 
God, and which therefore seems meaningless to 
them. He connects our experiences with similar 
experience through which Jesus passed, and lets 
the light of Christ fall upon our life. None can 
say that theology so approached is unpractical 
and remote from daily concerns. Christianity is 
a Way, a particular method of handling happen- 
ings or a specific path through situations. But 
it is a Way because it is also a Truth, an expla- 
nation of occurrences which gives them divine 
significance. 

This suggests one theme on which a preacher 
needs to speak at least once a year and to speak 
‘with the utmost caution, for it is a most difficult 
-subject—the Providence of God. How shall we 
interpret His control over a world which is still 
only in the making and which is as yet so im- 
perfectly ethicised? On the one hand we believe 
in God’s sovereignty, His wise provision which 
has planned existence and directs it to loving 
ends. On the other hand we believe in human 
freedom, which may thwart God’s will, and in hu- 
man initiative which summons us to be co-crea- 
tors of this unfinished world, mastering disease, 
‘subduing forces that imperil humanity, organis- 


76 WHAT TO PREACH 


ing that commonwealth of loving spirits who shall 
use the earth and the fulness thereof in justice 
and good will. To live in a dwelling still under 
construction is hazardous. It will not do to 
bid men accept as God’s will social conditions or 
physical infirmities which are due to man’s ignor- 
ance or selfishness. But the dwelling is of God’s 
planning, and He knows the risks involved in its 
building. He has accepted them, and exposed 
His children to them. We must accept them 
with Him, and also with Him strive to make the 
dwelling more safe and homelike for those who 
shall succeed us. We must acquire both the ac- 
quiescence of Jesus in stern necessities, and the 
aggressiveness of Jesus towards hampering cir- 
cumstance. This is theological preaching which 
supplies a reasonable basis both for courage and — 
determination and for patience and tranquillity 
of soul. 
And this naturally leads to another theme 
which should have even more frequent treatment 
—the subject of personal intercourse with God. 
Sermons on prayer are more likely to call forth | 
expressions of sincere appreciation than sermons — 
on any other topic. And when we treat this mat- | 
ter of communion with God, let us not be hesi- | 
tant in giving concrete suggestions as to how to 
read the Bible for personal devotion, and how to 





DOCTRINAL PREACHING gir 


pray, and how to-spend a few minutes in silent 
meditation. We make a great mistake if we 
fancy that such details are too elementary. To 
be sure, temperaments vary and a method which 
suits one does not fit another, but there are many 
in all our congregations to whom fellowship with 
the Invisible means next to nothing, because they 
have no idea whatsoever how to establish and 
maintain helpful contact with the Most Near. 
Here of all places let the preacher think of him- 
self as an instructor, speaking both from his own 
experience and from observation and telling men 
and women how to wait upon God. Supremely 
let us be sure that we make plain that the all- 
important result of such prayer and Bible study 
and meditation is God Himself in more conscious 
and enlightening and empowering comradeship 
with us. We must not forget that the meaning 
of our Lord’s great saying is “Every one that 
asketh,’’ whatever may be his immediate desire, 
“receiveth God.” “How much more shall your 
heavenly Father give the Holy Smrit to them 
that ask Him.” 

The supreme subject of doctrinal preaching is 
the cross of Christ. One has only to measure the 
relative space given it in the New Testament, not 
only in the epistles but in all four gospels, to 
gain an idea of the proportionate attention it 








78 WHAT TO PREACH 


should receive in the teaching of those who wish 
to be guided by the New Testament balance. It 
is a good plan annually to devote the Sundays 
which lead up to Good Friday to a course of ser- 
mons upon some aspect of the death of Christ. 
Usually one discovers that his people are more 
reverent, more tender, more moved, during such 
preaching than at ordinary times. There is a 
searching course of sermons in the factors which 
nailed Christ to the tree—Church leaders, pos- 
sessors of lucrative vested rights, an imperial offi- 
cial, an aristocrat and man of the world, a dis- 
appointed idealist, soldiers, a mob, the unpro- 
testing public. One often hears it said that the 
modern pulpit does not preach sin. Men are not 
led to repentance by general treatments of evil, 
but in such concrete portrayals of those who 
caused the supreme tragedy at Golgotha, the 
mirror is held up and we see ourselves. 

There is another rewarding course in the at- 
tempt to answer the question, Why did Jesus go 
to Calvary? taking up those events or sayings in 
the Gospel which throw most light on Jesus’s” 
own conception of His mission:—the Baptism, 
the Temptation, the Conversation with His dis- 
ciples on cross-bearing, the Transfiguration, the 
Entry into Jerusalem, the Lord’s Supper, 
Gethsemane, Calvary. | 


DOCTRINAL PREACHING 79 


Still a third: course may gather up the doc- 
trinal results of these historical approaches to 
the death of Christ, and interpret “the word of 
the cross” on Sin, Suffering, Forgiveness, Duty, 
Wisdom, Power—the theology of Golgotha in 
_ that it deals with God’s Self-disclosure there. On 
the south shore of Long Island there are many 
smaller and larger bodies of water which puzzle 
a, visitor to say whether they are ponds or bays. 
Some of them are ponds, although they lie beside 
the sand dunes. Their waters may be slightly 
brackish, but their fish and plants are those of in- 
land pools. Others have an open inlet from the 
Atlantic: their fish and plants are those of the 
salt ocean, and their waters rise and fall with 
the tides of the great deep. We can never under- 
stand and interpret the cross until we see in it 
not only man’s supreme achievement, but God’s 
Self-revelation in His vicariously suffering, sin- 
bearing Son. 

And one has only begun to suggest the many 
series of doctrinal sermons which year after year 
a, preacher finds in some aspect of the mightiest 
redemptive act of God. Think of the New Tes- 
tament passages which treat it as a measure “even 
as.’ ‘That is a fine saying which comes to us 
from Clement of Alexandria: “Our boundary, 
our limit, is the cross.”” A New Testament writer 


80 WHAT TO PREACH 


speaks of “the Pioneer of faith, who endured the 
cross;” and it is the frontier of much more than 
faith—of sympathy, of service, of sacrifice, of the 
outgoing Heart of God and of the upreaching 
conscience of Man. Here is a theme for a 
preacher’s clearest thinking and his most moving 
pleading—Christ crucified, the wisdom and 
power of God. 

We began by speaking of theology as the ever- 
changing interpretation of the soul’s life with 
God. Since the advent and widespread use of 
motor vehicles, our American roads have been 
everywhere reconstructed and are again and 
again under repair. One can scarcely make a 
day’s run in most parts of the country without 
finding some segment of highway in the hands 
of road-makers; but one takes the route confident 
that a temporary detour, however rough, has 
been provided so that traffic is not blocked. It is 
much the same with theology in every generation, 
and certainly in ours. Many a doctrine has been 
and still is under reconstruction, and at times we 
are forced to travel in our thinking by rather 
crudely improvised detours. But the highways 
of thought that link man with the Invisible are 
open; and it is for us preachers to familiarise our- 
selves and our people with them, that they and 
we may be in conscious and intelligent fellow- 
ship with God. 


LECTURE Iilf 


ETHICAL PREACHING 


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LECTURE III 


ETHICAL PREACHING 


A cENTURY ago John Foster, commenting 
upon the defects of the preaching in that day, 
wrote: “In the department of Christian morality, 
I think many of those who are distinguished as 
evangelical preachers are greatly and culpably 
deficient. ‘They rarely, if ever, take some one 
topic of moral duty, as honesty, veracity, im- 
partiality, temper, forgiveness of injuries, the 
improvement of time, and investigate specifically 
its principles, rules, discriminations, adaptions. 
Such discussions would have cost far more labor 
of thought than dwelling and expatiating on the 
general evangelical doctrines, but would have 
been eminently useful.’ Waiving the point 
whether ethical preaching requires more intel- 
lectual outlay than the theological preaching, we 
shall agree with Foster’s plea for thorough- 
going treatment of Christian duty in the pulpit. 

One can think of several reasons for its rela- 
tive neglect: 

A first is the confidence in the spontaneous ap- 


pearance and growth of the fruits of the Spirit, 
ine see 


84 WHAT TO PREACH 


when a man has been persuaded to admit Christ 
to the lordship of his will. ‘There is an automatic 
change in character springing from the depths 
where motives take their rise. St. Paul wrote 
the Thessalonians: “Concerning love of the breth- 
ren, ye have no need that one write unto you: for 
ye yourselves are taught of God to love one an- 
other.” But it is noteworthy how large a space 
in his letters the apostle devotes to writing about 
this very grace. He does not appear to expect 
it to spring and flourish of itself. Perhaps his 
introduction of the topic with the statement that 
it is needless to mention it is merely good peda- 
gogy, as we say to a child: “Of course you will 
share this with your brother,’’ when we fear that 
the chances of selfishness are very great. The 
spiritual life is like certain vines, which will either 
lie on the ground in a tangle, or trail off over the 
garden to interfere with and strangle other 
growths, or will climb a trellis if one be provided 
and the young shoots started upon it. The ideals 
which are held up before Christians are the trel- 
lis, which both supplies the vine of their spirit 
with something to climb upon and also determines 
the shape and appearance which their life will 
take. A chief criticism of much of the most ear- 
nest evangelical preaching, which pleads with 
men “to accept Christ,” is that the word “Chris- 


ETHICAL PREACHING 85 


tian” is left without definite ethical content. We 
cannot be too explicit in teaching what the life 
“in Christ” demands. 

A. second reason is that preachers take for 
granted that their listeners know what goodness 
is, and merely need compulsions to try to be 
good. Every generation has labelled its desired 
virtues “Christian,” with little regard to their 
appraisal by the historic Jesus. In the genera- 
tions when the ethics of capitalism were unques- 
tioned among evangelical Christians, self-reli- 
ance, push and thrift were extolled in pulpit and 
Sunday School. They are certainly not without 
a basis in the teaching of Jesus, nor would we 
belittle them today. But they have often been 
anything but virtues in the forms which they have 
taken. (There is no doubt something humorous 
ina Yankee’s discussing these characteristics with 
Scotsmen, but of all mankind you and I ought 
to know whereof we are speaking.) We must 
always remember that Jesus did not come to help 
men attain current ideals. The righteousness of 
His disciples was to exceed the righteousness of 
the best men of the time. ‘Their conduct was to 
be so conspicuously above the level of even the 
good that they would stand out as a city set on a 
hill, Itis the preacher’s task in every age to point 
to the hill. A current indictment of the Church 


86 WHAT TO PREACH 


runs that membership in it is no guarantee of an 
outstanding conscience. One would not dispar- 
age the work of rescue and especially of preven- 
tion carried on by our churches. We pull up 
some who have fallen into pits, and we keep 
many more from tumbling in. But we pull them 
up to and hold them on the common level. They 
are as good as, but no better than, the people on 
the same block. If Christians are to be salt and 
light and leaven, we must concern ourselves with 
that which differentiates them in motive and 
principle. This was the controlling interest in 
most of the preaching of Jesus. 

A. third reason is both the difficulty of think- 
ing through what the Christian ideal is under 
existing social conditions—a matter, as Foster 
well says, of costly mental labor—and a Protes- 
tant minister’s rightful shrmking from seeming 
to direct the consciences of others. We do 
not wish congregations of spiritual children, 
who call us “Father”? and docilely do as we bid 
them, but of mature sons and daughters of God. 
The danger, however, either in Scotland or 
America, of a preacher’s impairing the spiritual 
independence of his hearers is slight. ew con- 
gregations take their minister’s ethical judg- 
ments too seriously. As pastors, when people 
come for counsel upon personal problems, we 


ETHICAL PREACHING 87 


must be cautious in proffering specific advice 
and allowing dependent natures to shift respon- 
sibility for their decisions on our shoulders; but 
as preachers, addressing numbers of folk, we are 
rarely in peril of handling matters of Christian 
duty too explicitly. Our danger is quite the re- 
verse: we do not teach them what Christian love 
and trust and frankness and patience and self- 
control and gladness are. We fail to follow the 
Master in showing them how to be sons of God. 
In laying out his pulpit work for a period of 
months, a preacher ought surely to plan one 
series of sermons on Christian duty. He may 
start from the rich Biblical material. ‘There is an 
excellent course of sermons in “The Good Life 
according to Israel’s Law,” which lists under 
appropriate topics a judicious selection of the 
precepts laid down in the legal parts of the Pen- 
tateuch, completing each with the teaching of 
Jesus. This may seem to be going far afield for 
enlightenment and inspiration on the ethical 
questions of today. What have the prohibitions 
against seething a kid in its mother’s milk, or 
wearing a garment of mixed materials, or the 
command to build a parapet around the roof of 
one’s house, to do with present Christian obliga- 
tions? Not much directly; but these were ways 
of cultivating respectively delicate feeling, sin- 


88 WHAT TO PREACH 


cerity and thoughtfulness. One may use them 
as striking and picturesque beginnings, and 
draw the body of one’s sermon from the applica- 
tion of the mind of Christ to definite current sit- 
uations which demand these virtues. 

There is much more specific guidance in a 
series upon Wisdom’s Ways, as described in the 
Book of Proverbs and in the Apocryphal Books 
of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. Here again a 
preacher must select his subjects and group his 
verses, for no part of the Bible appears to have © 
been thrown together so _ helter-skelter: Wis- 
dom’s Way in Friendship, in Conversation, in 
Hospitality, in Business Dealings, in Work, in 
Self-control, and so on. 

A preacher is on more Christian ground when 
he takes the ethical injunctions in the concluding 
portions of St. Paul’s letters or selects half a 
dozen subjects from the Epistle of James. It is 
a less easy matter to arrange a satisfactory series 
in the teaching of our Lord Himself, for His 
principles are not as specific in form and they 
cover a wider range of life. However, there is an 
ample literature to help us, and I cannot do bet- 
ter than recommend the admirable little book on 
this subject, into which my distinguished col- 
league at Union Seminary, Professor Ernest F. 
Scott, one of the richest gifts your Church has 


ETHICAL PREACHING | 89 


made to America, has packed so much learning, 
insight and sound sense. 

As was said in a previous lecture, one advan- 
tage of using the Bible as the basis of one’s in- 
struction is that its writers inevitably suggest 
points which the preacher would not himself 
think of. If a man is giving a series on the 
fruits of the Spirit, as St. Paul itemizes them, or 
upon the Beatitudes as they stand in St. Mat- 
thew, he will be led to several qualities which he 
would not have put down on a list of his own 
choosing. If he handles the Ten Command- 
ments, he finds in the Tenth a more searching 
test of the motives which underlie the Kighth, for 
one can deal with the principles that govern 
property without discussing the attitude of heart 
which one is forced to search out in covetousness. 
If one is treating Love upon the basis. of the 
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, one 
must do justice to all the aspects of the apostle’s 
many-sided analysis of what Love does and does 
not do. Moreover the Bible puts its principles 
into language which cannot be bettered for point- 
edness and profundity, and which carries with it 
the approbation of the generations of the faith- 
ful who have lived by these precepts and found 
them wise. But it is a mistake always to start 
with the ethical teaching of some Biblical book. 


90 WHAT TO PREACH 


It has already been urged that a preacher select 
his topics; and such selection presupposes that 
he begin with the needs of his hearers, and use 
only so much of the matter in the Scripture as 
fits his purpose. Often he will arouse more in- 
terest by announcing a list of topics on conduct, 
bringing in Biblical passages, and particularly 
the example and teaching of Christ, in his treat- 
ment of each theme. 

For instance, he may call the series: “The 
Christian Management of Life.” In one of his 
letters Jowett, the Master of Balliol, speaks of 
an illness as something to be “managed.” A 
Christian is one who overcomes the world and 
subdues it to His Master’s purpose. Under the 
general caption the preacher may place such 
headings as he thinks his congregation need to 
have dealt with; the Christian’s Management of 
the Body, of Feelings, of Tastes, of Time, of 
Money, of Disappointments, and the lke. In 
preparing for such a course, a preacher may 
solicit from the congregation situations or cir- 
cumstances which they find it hard to master and 
Christianise. Parents and teachers often wel- 
come the chance to share some of their difficulties, 
and to hear them treated from the pulpit. 

Or starting from the noble conception of St. 
Paul, a conception in which he voices Jesus’ 


- ETHICAL PREACHING 91 


lordly attitude towards the world, that every- 
thing belongs to children of God, a preacher may 
give a series upon “A Christian’s Use of His 
Possessions” —‘‘of Health, of Suffering, of In- 
fluence, of the Love of Others, of Education, of 
His Work, of Recreation, of Abilities and De- 
fects, of Life’s Successive Stages—Youth, the 
Middle Years, Old Age, of Sorrow, of Death.” 
A. text for the course is “All things are yours,” 
and such a course aims to give followers of Christ 
their Master’s sense of being at home in a 
Father’s universe with a possessive right to en- 
joy and use all that happens to them. A not dis- 
similar course of sermons may take its title from 
Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man,” and dis- 
cuss successively the control by the Spirit of 
Christ of Infancy, Boyhood, Young Manhood 
and the rest. One can illustrate from Christian 
literature and biography, and bring home the 
educational design of our human life, its tragedy 
for the unteachable, and its lessons for those who 
spend it in the school of Jesus. 

Or again, mindful that Christ comes not to 
destroy but to complete, to transmute the good 
into the best, a preacher may treat “Common 
Virtues Uncommonly Exemplified in Christ”; 
and deal with Honesty, Courage, Fairness, 
Kindness, Sympathy, Candour, Industry, Af- 


92 WHAT TO PREACH 


fection, Fidelity, as they are illustrated in Jesus 
Himself. As men look in Him at the qualities 
which they praise in others and crave for them- 
selves, the miracle of Cana is re-enacted before 
their eyes. Our ordinary words for the admir- 
able are carelessly used and cheapened. We sel- 
dom weigh them when we call a man brave or 
kindly or faithful. Our moral currency easily 
becomes debased, and the words for worth in our 
vocabulary suffer from inflation. The study of 
the character of Jesus, and the definition of 
virtues in terms of His life, puts them on the 
solid basis of heavenly gold. He turns our 
abstracts into concretes, and gives our loftiest 
adjectives yet higher value. 

Or a preacher may take some generally 
esteemed characteristic, like the sense of humour, 
and study its uses and abuses, and illustrate from 
Christ’s employment of it its place among the 
qualities which belong in the household of faith. 
“There is a time to laugh.” 

_ Or he may view the elements of character to 
be cultivated from their use in the several rela- 
tions of life:—the Christian at Home, at Busi- 
ness, at Play, in the Church, as a Citizen, as a 
Man of the World. Such a course opens the way 
for plain speaking on sins and defects as well as 
on virtues to be sought after. It not infrequently 


ETHICAL PREACHING 93 


happens that one who possesses the domestic 
graces in a high degree is singularly lacking in 
business ethics, and that the loyal and devoted 
churchman is a poor citizen. “A Christian’s re- 
sponsibilities lie about him in concentric circles: 
they begin in the home, but they reach out to the 
whole family of mankind. We learn in the 
home considerateness, patience, responsibility 
for others and happiness in serving them; we 
must carry these virtues out into the realm of 
industry and commerce. We acquire system, 
reliability and initiative in business affairs; and 
must take these qualities into our work as mem- 
bers of the Church. We are taught as citizens 
respect for the rights of others, special care for 
the weak in order that the state may be strong, 
the subordination of self-interest to patriotism; 
-like characteristics are requisite in the citizen of 
the commonwealth of nations. It is a preacher’s 
duty to make clear what the obligations in each 
circle are in the light of Jesus Christ. 
Something has been said of the satisfac- 
tion many derive from the explicit teaching in 
the control of life given by Christian Science and 
similar cults. It is a serious reflection on the 
church that those brought up in its congregations 
often hear for the first time in their lives from 
these questionable movements how to use religion 


94 WHAT TO PREACH 


to cope with some of the ills of life. When hun- 
dreds profess themselves benefited by employing 
autosuggestion in such banal formule as those 
of M. Coué, one is reproached to think of the 
treasury of vastly finer phases for the same pur- 
pose within the covers of the Bible, which neither 
we nor our people dream of using. A preacher 
discovers that a series of sermons upon “Religion 
and Healthy Living” affords a welcome oppor- 
tunity for his people to think of the nexus of 
faith and health, to be shown the exaggerated 


and false teaching both of materialistic science 


and of these unscientific cults, and to have 
opened up to them some of the passages in Scrip- 
ture with which to suggest to themselves the 
courage and serenity and poise they need. Take 
such themes as “Faith and Fatigue,” “Faith and 
Nervousness,” “Faith and Worry,” “Faith and 
Fear,” “Faith and Pain,” “Faith and Kmergen- 


cies,” “Faith and Weakness,” “Faith and the ~ 
Inevitable,” and one has a course in an aspect of ; 
Christian ethics which places in the category of _ 
sins attitudes of mind not so regarded—anxiety, _ 
restlessness, waste of energy and so forth, and — 


which gives a preacher a chance to suggest the 
proper regulation of the physical and mental life, 


and the bringing of the whole man under the © 


-. ETHICAL PREACHING 95 


sway of the guiding and empowering Spirit of 
Christ. 

The preacher will need to study books that are 
scientifically reliable, to consult neurologists and 
psychiatrists who are usually most kind in their 
willingness to assist and who often welcome a 
minister’s help with their cases, to Jet some man 
of competent medical training tell him frankly 
mistakes to avoid. In sermons upon these topics 
vague generalities must be scrupulously avoided 
and illustrations drawn from concrete cases. 
Varieties of fatigue or nervousness or fear must 
be instanced, so that hearers find their cases ap- 
preciated and understood; the causes of their 
weaknesses and inhibitions must be analysed; 
and definite methods of dealing with them sug- 
gested. One cannot be too specific in giving 
verses which have helped persons through ordeals 
or enabled them to overcome sleeplessness, and 
in telling just how impediments have been con- 
quered and burdens borne. The strain of our 
complex and rushed life demands reinforcements 
of the spirit to endure it and to find in it a means 
of growing a larger soul. “As thy days so shall 
thy strength be” is a promise vouchsafed to every 
generation of God’s children. We do not ques- 
tion the adequacy of our resources in God; but it 


96 WHAT TO PREACH 


is patent that relatively few Christians know how 
to avail themselves of these resources in crises 
and under the steady strain of life. Here is a 
preacher’s chance to show how the Bible can be 
used and how prayer can effect spiritual repair. 
There is a “law of the spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus,” and it is our duty to know that law, and 
to be able to show our people how to conform to 
it and be freed by it from needless thraldoms and 
made victorious in life and in death, 

We differ radically from cults which deny the 
existence of the disagreeable and painful. We 
have no sympathy with ascetics who urge volun- 
tary infliction of suffering or submission to hard- 
ships as in themselves spiritually beneficial. Nor 
have we anything in common with the at present 
widespread feeling that everything unpleasant is 
to be avoided, that no cravings are to be re- 
pressed, that no irksome obligations are to be 
endured: this is crass paganism and the direct 
antithesis of losing one’s self to find it. We re- 
joice in the advances of science and invention 
which render human life safer and healthier. But 
we cannot blind our eyes to the fact that civilisa- 
tion develops new diseases and that progress in 
man’s control of the universe is accompanied 
with new possibilities of peril. Danger and pain 
and irritation and death are apparently part of 





- ETHICAL PREACHING | 97 


the order of things. They are not electives but 
required courses in the curriculum of life. They 
are to be faced open-eyed; their lessons mastered ; 
and they are themselves to be turned by the grace 
of Christ to glorious gain both to ourselves and 
to others. 

Take the first theme suggested, “Faith and 
Fatigue.” ‘What is it that wearies us? Some of 
our fatigue is imaginary. We talk of “tired 
nerves,’ but physiologists have demonstrated 
that the mind wearies before the nervous system, 
which renews itself overnight. Or we fancy our- 
selves rushed merely because we live in a busy 
city or among busy folk; a scrutiny of our 
week’s stint of labour reveals no overburden. 
Thinking one’s self tired brings on exhaustion. 
Some of our fatigue is needless:—living expe- 
riences over again and again in retrospect and 
blaming one’s self for mistakes; inability to relax 
so that we sit in a taxicab tensely pushing the 
car forward to hasten to a destination, or lie on 
our beds with taut muscles and clenched hands; 
want of system by which we idle part of a week 
and let six days’ task pile up into three; faulty 
planning of time, trying to do creative work at 
night instead of in the morning, and with stimu- 
lated brains wonder that we cannot sleep. Break- 
downs due to such causes are moral, not physical. 


98 WHAT TO PREACH 


Some of our fatigue is necessary :—routine plac- 
ing the same strains in the same places (a steel 
rail wears out because the pounding of the trains, 
repeating the same vibrations, loosens the mole- 
cules in the steel) ; let-downs inevitably succeed- 
ing special efforts; the rub of other people upon 
us wearing even though we do not realise it. Are 
we providing change of mind and feeling? re- 
newals after outlays? solitude of soul for self- 
possession? Religion offers us in God the Foun- 
tain of life. They that wait on Him renew their 
strength. A Bible passage, a church service, | 
prayer, a thought of God supplies spiritual 
change, suggests the soul’s exhaustless resources, 
isolates from people and brings balance and self- 
mastery. Have we learned to rest in the Lord? 
To relax our spirits on such promises as “Under- 
neath are the everlasting arms,” “Commit thy 
way unto the Lord: trust also in Him and He 
shall bring it to pass’; “My grace is sufficient for 
thee’; ‘““He restoreth my soul”? A head of a 
nurses’ training school and superintendent of the 
nurses in a large hospital, at the close of a 
month’s epidemic of influenza, with a much de- 
pleted force of nurses, for it was in the war when 
fully half her staff were overseas, having worked 
nearly twenty hours out of each twenty-four, said 
to a subordinate: “I’m all in. I must consult a 


ETHICAL PREACHING 3 99 


nerve specialist or’—and she does not know 
why she said it, for she had not attended church 
in years—‘“go to church.” The next evening, 
being Sunday, she put on her hat and started 
out, against the remonstrances of this other 
nurse, who told her she should be in bed. She 
entered the church, had her mind soothed by 
prayer and hymn, and carried to other thoughts. 
She went back to her work calmed, had a few 
hours of untroubled rest, and went bravely and 
vigorously on with her responsible work. “Our 
sufficiency is of God!” | 

Or take the final theme suggested a moment 
ago—“Faith and the Inevitable.” Here are 
situations where incurable disease has to be 
faced, or crippling financial loss, or the estrange- 
ment of friends, or the death of one’s beloved, or 
a, domestic tragedy worse than death. How shall 
one meet them? One finds a supreme instance in 
Jesus in Gethsemane. He does not blindly ac- 
cept the cross: even at the eleventh hour, when 
He seemed to have reached a conclusion, saying, 
“The Son of man goeth as it is written of Him,” 
He canvasses other alternatives: “If it be pos- 
sible.’ But His inquiring mind is forced to view 
the tragic and appalling ordeal of a felon’s execu- 
tion as inescapable. ‘There is an interesting dif- 
ference in the account of His prayers in the nar- 


100 WHAT TO PREACH 


ratives of Mark and Matthew. St. Mark reports 
Him in His second prayer as “saying the same 
words”; but the first evangelist puts different 
words on His lips. He had prayed: “My 
Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
from Me.” ‘The second time He prays: “My 
Father, if this cannot pass away except I drink 
it.” He is confronting the inevitable. Men face 
it in various ways. Some attempt to deaden 
their senses with drink or drugs, or immerse 
themselves in pleasure or business to forget it. — 
Others rebel and protest and are driven to it, 
“like the quarry slave at night scourged to his 
dungeon.” Others set their teeth and summon 
up their resolve and grimly go through with it. 
Sir Walter Scott, heroically as he met his dis- 
aster and sorrows, seems more a stoic than a 
Christian. When Lady Scott lay dying, he 
quoted from Shakespeare :— 


Are these things then necessities? 
Then let us meet them like necessities. 


And there is much of the same temper in what 
is called the spirit of “‘a good sport,” which is the 
popular ideal held up so generally before young ~ 
folk today. How does Jesus meet the inevitable. — 
He looks it in the face, refusing the narcotic at 


ETHICAL PREACHING 101 


Calvary provided by humane feeling. He will 
“taste the whole of it.”” He utters no word of 
complaint against the falseness of Judas or the 
bigotry of priests or the injustice of the civil gov- 
ernor: He accepts the inevitable not from their 
hands but from His Father’s. Instead of stoic 
resignation, He cordially acquiesces and gives 
Himself to carry out, so far as He may, His 
Father’s will: “Thy will be done.” He gives the 
unavoidable a welcome, and trustfully and obe- 
diently works with it, and renders it an incal- 
culable blessing. 

The preacher who handles a series of this kind 
must expect to have the sermons followed up by 
calls from persons who wish to consult him, either 
for themselves or for their friends; and his time 
and energy may be heavily drawn on. He will 
have a chance to practise what he has been 
preaching, and to replenish himself from those 
exhaustless reservoirs of the Spirit to which he 
has been pointing others. Perhaps he can ar- 
range more informal meetings, like the mid- 
week service of prayer, where persons who have 
used their faith ta master weaknesses and to over- 
come or transform their limitations can tell their 
experiences, or at least suggest the help which 
they have found in particular Bible passages or 
in other means of grace. The vogue of often 


102 WHAT TO PREACH 


fantastic cults is surely evidence that men are 
looking for help in their souls to meet life’s over- 
whelming demands and to conquer inhibitions in 
their own natures. It is scientifically demon- 
strable that the well-being of the body is closcly 
related with the vigour of the spirit. As pastors 
we are confronted with the alternative of having 
our people consult psycho-analysts or other 
practitioners on the mind, few of whom are either 
scientifically or spiritually qualified for the task, 
or of attempting to help them ourselves, in con- 
junction, if need be, with duly accredited phy- 
sicians, most of whom welcome our partnership. 
There is a considerable literature, both from the 
scientific and religious standpoint, upon which 
we may draw. Historically the Christian Church 
has precedents, both in her formative period in 
the New Testament and throughout the cen- 
turies, for including the principles of healthy 
living as part of her mission of teaching. We — 
may well shrink from it as exceedingly difficult 
and delicate. Some of us are pathetically ill- 
equipped in temperament or in knowledge to 
deal with it. But it seems a part of every 
preacher’s plain duty, and he dare not neglect it. 

For nearly a generation now a new emphasis 
has been placed upon the social embodiment of 


the Spirit of Christ. Would that it had come 


ETHICAL PREACHING 103 


earlier and the world catastrophe averted! The 
Kingdom of God is not made up of redeemed in- 
dividuals only, but of transformed families and 
nations and races. ‘This opens up a wide range 
of topics for the preacher. 

Let him begin and lay most stress upon the 
Christian ideal of the family. The principles of 
Jesus are best learned there, for the great words 
of our religion—Father, love, brethren—are 
drawn from the home. And today the Christian 
home is in jeopardy. The permanence of the 
marriage tie is widely flouted. In the United 
States several hundred thousands are living in a 
legalised consecutive concubinage, marrying, 
divorcing and marrying again. ‘The percentage 
from the latest figures is for the entire country 
one divorce to every nine marriages, and in cer- 
tain notorious states one divorce to every three 
or four marriages. Britain is moving in the 
same direction, although happily at no such ap- 
palling rate. A pastor with us is constantly 
shocked by members of his congregation who 
come to tell him that their home is on the verge of 
breaking. There are situations where it is in- 
human to forbid the separation of man and wife; 
but these occur rarely, and heroic souls, with a 
loyal love like Hosea’s, can often hold on, despite 
the impossible, and work redemption. We must 


104 WHAT TO PREACH 


not hesitate in these soft days to call for heroism 
in the wedded relation. And it is the lightness 
with which marriage vows are repudiated which — 
is terrifying. A wife complains that her hus- 
band represses her personality, and a husband 
says, “My wife has never understood me,” and 
consoles himself with a more artful charmer. 
The unfortunate children are unconsidered, or — 
their parents dupe themselves into thinking that 
the arrangements by which boys and girls spend 
a few months with mother and her new mate, and 
a few months with father and his new partner, 
are happier for them than when father and 
mother were plainly uncongenial together and 
often quarreled in their presence. ‘There is dire 
need for teaching what is meant by marrying 
and staying married “in the Lord.” 

Nor are the relations of parents and children 
easy in many homes.’ With us where the chil-— 
dren of the foreign-born often know more of 
American life than their elders, and frequently — 
earn more while still in their teens, it is they who 
lead their parents rather than being led by them. 
And on both sides of the Atlantic there is a new — 
independence among the young, and especially 
among girls, which has in it elements both good 
and bad. What is the purpose of the home in the ~ 
kingdom of God? What should the family mean 


ETHICAL PREACHING 105 


to both parents and children? What are their 
mutual responsibilities? What qualities in either 
make home unhappy? What are the duties of a 
@hristian in a spiritually unsympathetic family? 
Chesterton has said that the family is a good in- 
stitution because it is uncongenial. How should 
personal religion manifest itself in home rela- 
tions? You may recall George Eliot’s remark, 
apropos of Bulstrode, concerning persons whose 
“celestial intimacies seem not to improve their 
domestic manners.” What customs of family 
religion hallow the home? What temptations to 
a Christian lurk in family ties, and how may a 
home be dedicated to the kingdom of Christ? 
Here is matter for many sermons, and matter 
which demands frequent treatment. 

Next there is the Christianising of industry. 
Qur main interest is in the types of men and 
women an economic system preduces; and in- 
dustrial systems are reservoirs of motives, a 
moral water-supply. One approach to the sub- 
ject is to describe several typical organisations 
of society—for example, the Greek City State, 
the Feudal System, the present Capitalist Order 
—and to point out what virtues each inculcates, 
and what elements in the population feel its 
moral incentives. The Greek City State stressed 
the civic virtues, but not for slaves, who were 


106 WHAT TO PREACH 


the miners and other laborers, and who num- 
bered sometimes as many as four-fifths of 
the inhabitants. The Feudal System held up the 
militarist virtues—honour, loyalty, courtesy, obe- 
dience, courage—but the ethics of chivalry had 
no appeal for the serf or the trader. The 
Capitalist Régime puts a premium on initiative, 
enterprise, thrift, reliability, and its incentives 
stimulate a large percentage of the people; but 
they can afford little inspiration to those born 
to great wealth (who usually take up the feudal 
code) or with those who have no chance to rise. 
Do any of these systems promote the virtues of 
the Gospel? Do they produce the brotherhood 
in labor and enjoyment which the Spirit of Jesus 
demands? So the preacher holds up the King- 
dom of God in protest against existing industrial 
relations, and paints a vision of the world’s work 
under the reign of the ministering Son of man. 
But this by no means exhausts his responsi- 
bility as a teacher of social righteousness. Men 
set in positions of leadership in business enter- 
prises and compelled to carry on, and workers 
suffering from unemployment or confronted 
with harsh and inhuman conditions when em- 
ployed, become restive when preachers sketch 
Utopias. God forbid that we should cease to 
proclaim Christ’s kingdom in all its glory: visions” 


ETHICAL PREACHING 107 


have their place, for “we are saved in hope.” But 
preachers have the more difficult task of showing 
what Christians can and ought to do under 
present circumstances, and thus hasten a better 
tomorrow. In our congregations are thoughtful 
folk who know that for them there remain but 
five or ten or twenty years of active work. It is 
heartening to view on the horizon what shall be 
when the reign of God in industry has arrived; 
but they not unnaturally wish to know what is 
their duty meanwhile, and what advances they 
may attempt ere their day is done. 

The Scylla and Charybdis between which 
preachers on this subject must steer are indulg- 
ing in platitudes:—that the Spirit of Christ ap- 
plied to industry will solve all our problems, that 
the use of Christian love will end economic strife, 
etc.—and we have had this sort of thing from 
the pulpit ad nauseam; and the attempt without 
first-hand knowledge to tell those who know how 
to conduct their affairs. This does not mean that 
a minister need remain ignorant. If he will take 
the trouble he can familiarise himself in detail 
with the conditions in at least one industry. 
And ministers ought to acquaint themselves with 
the leading industry in their community—agri- 
culture, mining, or some occupation or form of 
manufacture or commerce. If a minister be 


108 WHAT TO PREACH 


really informed, earnestly concerned and scru- 
pulously fair, he can be of the utmost service in 
helping to avert strife and in bettering the spirit 
and conditions in which the work is done. And 
with this first-hand contact he can speak from the 
pulpit with assurance and give counsel which 
will be listened to. 

Some scholars have taught that the ethics of 
the New Testament were provisional, an Inter- 
imsethik, for its writers were looking for the 
speedy advent of the kingdom. They were 
wrong in forgetting that the spirit and principles 
given by Jesus and His first interpreters are per- 
manently valid; they were right in insisting that 
the applications made in the New Testament 
to concrete problems were provisional. ‘This 
renders these solutions not less but more valu- 
able to us. Every generation of Christians find 
themselves in an interim between an outworn 
past and a desired, but imperfectly discerned, 
future.’ Our Christian solutions of social ques- 
tions must accordingly be always temporary. 
This does not make them for their day any the 
less Christian, for Christianity is essentially a 
Way—life en route towards the kingdom of God. 
A. preacher may entitle a series of sermons “A 
More Christian Industrial Order,” so disclaim- 
ing the attempt to set forth the ultimate ideal, 


ETHICAL PREACHING 109 


and he may treat the present duties of Christians 
as Producers, as Consumers, as Owners, as In- 
vestors, as Employers, as Employés. This 
method of handling the subject follows New 
Testament precedent; seeks to introduce the 
leavening Spirit of Christ rather than to advocate 
some economic programme, for which we cannot 
claim divine authority; and enables us to give 
counsel sufficiently definite to awaken consciences 
and spur men and women to think out their own 
courses as Christians in commercial relations. 
Then there is the Christian ideal of recreation. 
Preachers have indulged far too often in ne nega- 
tives—in condemnation, and usually undiscrim- 
jnating condemnation, of certain popular forms 
of amusement and sport. The need is for posi- 
tive teaching on the necessity of recreation for a 
wholesome life, on the value for character-build- 
ing of the right sort of games and outings and 
reading, on the test of pleasures:—to what does 
this recreate? A useful text is St. Paul’s thrice 
repeated, “All things are lawful’—the Christian 
life is one of freedom, not of restriction, “for God 
giveth us all things richly to enjoy’—and his 
three qualifying clauses, which raise the ques- 
tions: Is this expedient? Does it enslave? Does 
it build character? 
There are sports and games which need re- 


/ 


110 WHAT TO PREACH 


deeming from brutality and gambling—always a 
reflection on the intrinsic interest of the sport or 
game, and a demoralising influence upon work 
with its principle of gain without compensating 
service. ‘There are amusements, like the stage 
and dancing, which can be and often are de- 
graded, but which can also be means of the finest 
pleasure. You remember how King Asa took 
the stones and timbers with which a rival mon- 
arch had attempted to erect a blockading fortress 
and employed them in the construction of two 
towns of Judah. It is the Church’s business to 
take forms of recreation which are mimical to 
Christian character and remodel them so that 
their valuable elements promote the purpose of 
Christ. | 

The War drove thoughtful Christians to study 
afresh the application of the mind of Christ to 
the policies of nations. Frew virtues need more 
intelligent sanctification than patriotism. The 
New Testament ideal may be phrased by putting 
side by side St. Peter’s saying to Christians, 
drawn from many lands: “Ye are a holy nation”; 
and the statement in the seer’s vision of the city 
of God: “They shall bring the glory and the 
honour of the nations into it.” Christianity cre-_ 
ates a fellowship of believers which overleaps — 
national frontiers, and gives the Christian a. 


\ 


ETHICAL PREACHING sey (aha 


superior allegiance to the people of God. It also 
recognises the individuality of nations with the 
distinctive contribution which each brings to the 
commonwealth of mankind, and lays on Chris- 
tian patriots the obligation to help their nation 
attain her best. 

And without raising again the question of 
pacifism surely we must agree that it is the duty 
of the Christian preacher to proclaim the sub- 
Christian character of war as a means of settling 
international questions and of accomplishing 
justice and friendship. And since war is always 
a symptom of something wrong in economic or 
political relations, it is our duty to go deeper and 
bring to light the causes which produce conflict. 
Like the prophets of Israel, the preacher must 
deal with his country’s mental attitude and her 
policies in international affairs. The citizens of 
a democracy determine its statesmanship, and it 
is all important that their views be Christian. 
Anniversaries or other national holidays furnish 
occasions when people expect us to treat public 
questions. We have to distinguish between 
moral issues and matters of political theory and 
preference; but with the recent judgment of 
God in history before our eyes, with its doom 
upon aggressive and selfish nationalism, and 
with the manifestation of the inability of force to 


112 WHAT TO PREACH 


create a desirable world, preachers of the Gospel 
of redeeming love dare not be silent. 

On the pages of the Bible are three attempts 
to make a righteous world. One is in Eden, 
where life is regulated by imposed law, and the 
result is unsatisfactory—a wiser but a fallen 
race. A second is at the Deluge, when the 
wicked are eliminated and the righteous segre- 
gated to make a new beginning; and the upshot 
is the wasteful loss of the many, and the swift 
deterioration of the elect few. A third is the at- 
tempt in the coming of Christ to create a right- 
eous world by imbuing mankind with His 
Spirit. It is the method of leavening by associa- 
tion. And it did not seem more successful than 
the other efforts. It brought on the tragedy of 
Golgotha. But how significant is the interpreta- 
tion of a New Testament writer: “Consider 
Him that hath endured such gainsaying of sin-— 
ners.” In both the other attempts the gainsay- — 
ing of sinners was not endured; and its endur- — 
ance by Christ, even to the pouring out of His 
blood, proved the genesis of a new race. 

We use all three methods—regulation, segre- 
gation, association—in the home. Little chil- — 
dren’s lives are prescribed to them; they are 
segregated from evil; parents try to be their — 
companions and impart their own consciences. 


ETHICAL PREACHING 113 


Regulation and segregation have a brief and 
limited usefulness; it is that of their own selves 
which parents impart which has lasting influence. 

The three methods have their vogue in the 
Christian Church. Roman Catholicism employs 
the first, imposing by authority dogma and 
morals upon the faithful. Protestantism has 
used the second, constantly separating the ortho- 
dox or the godly from those who disagree in be- 
lief or differ in ethical standards. The method 
of Jesus is to let truth stand beside error, con- 
fident that its superiority will be recognised, and 
to allow love to dwell with the unloving, taking 
the consequences, assured that love will conquer. 

The three methods are tried in industry. 
There is the dictatorship of the capitalist posses- 
sors, laying down the terms on which employés 
shall work, or the dictatorship of the proletariat 
in Communism. There is the elimination of the 
capitalist, or the limitation of employés in the 
closed shop, or the economic isolation of a land 
by a high protective tariff, or the exclusion by a 
labour union of workers of another race. One is 
not saying that such methods may not have a 
relative and temporary justification; but the 
principle for Christians is industrial fellowship, 
seeking to include all and to make each, accord- 
ing to his ability, minister to the commonwealth. 


114 WHAT TO PREACH 


The three methods are illustrated in interna- 
tional relations. The first is seen in imperialism, 
where a more potent, and perhaps more intelli- 
gent, people conquers and governs another. The 
second is seen in the policy of isolation, so 
vigorously advocated by a certain type of 
patriot, who would keep his beloved land out of 
the entanglements of association with other 
nations. ‘The third is the manifestly Christian 
policy of comradeship in thought and effort for 
the common good. | 

A preacher has to teach both the Christian 
ideal of social righteousness and the Christian 
method of its attainment. ‘The way to establish 
the Kingdom is the way of Bethlehem and 
Calvary. 

We have been touching hastily upon many 
ethical topics which a preacher should overtake 
in his teaching. Let us not forget that no ser- 
mon can handle conduct apart from religion, — 
morals without divine power by which Christlike 
characters are made possible. When we treat 
some theme of social ethics, it is not enough to 
bring home present social sins, and to make plain 
the demands of the Spirit of Christ. We preach — 
the Gospel of God—His gracious presence with — 
us to master evil and bring forth justice in 
victory. Ethical preaching along social lines — 


ETHICAL PREACHING 115 


seems to consist of three elements: protest f 
against current wrongs, programme setting 
forth specifically the steps Christians should 
take, promise linking God with our ideals and — 
efforts, and so supplying courage, patience and 
indomitable hope. And it is this last element 
which is the distinctive contribution of the 
minister of the Gospel. Ethical teachers criticise 
prevalent social conditions and plead for ad- 
vances, consciously or unconsciously prompted 
by the influence of Jesus Christ, for no teacher 
of righteousness in our world today escapes the 
contagion of His ideals. But the unique evangel- 
ical note is that back of both protest and pro- 
gramme is the living God, and that with Him 
what should be shall be. How gloriously the 
preachers of the Old Testament proclaimed this 
social Gospel: “Behold the days come, saith the 
Lord.” “The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall 
perform this.” Christian preachers in holding 
up the ideals of Jesus before individuals and 
society must be certain to close on this chord of 
faith. “He who began a good work in you will 
perfect it.” “To them that love God worketh 
all things with them for good,” “To this end we 
labour and strive, because we have our hope set 
on the living God.” 


LECTURE IV 


PASTORAL PREACHING 


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LECTURE IV 


PASTORAL PREACHING 


Tue preacher of the gospel is usually also a 
pastor, the personal friend of his people and the 
leader of a congregation in their corporate life 
and work. Many of his sermons arise from these 
two relations, and may be spoken of (somewhat 
clumsily) as pastoral preaching. 

A minister who is constantly among his peo- 
ple, visiting them and letting them come freely 
to him, is certain to have a large supply of sub- 
jects on hand in which he will wish to teach them. 
Sometimes a sermon will be born full-grown, like 
Minerva from the head of Jove, in some reveal- 
ing experience to which he is admitted. Often 
the period of incubation is longer. In a previous 
lecture it was urged that a preacher keep a note- 
book with texts and titles and illustrations. 
Such germinal sermons may lie dormant for 
months or even years; the preacher thinks them 
interesting and feels that they promise well, but 
he is not in travail with them. If he wrote them 
out, it would be in cold blood. But as he moves 


among men and women, some human situation 
119 


120 WHAT TO PREACH 


renders this text or theme a most apt and urgent 
subject of teaching. | 
For example, he has set down in his notebook — 
the passage about the friend who at midnight 
raps on his neighbor’s door for the loan of three — 
loaves, and he has put over it the caption: “What 
sends men to pray.” He sees there a sermon on 
social obligation as the spur to religion. It is 
like that text made striking by its context at the 
close of the Fourth Chapter of Genesis: “Then 
began men to call upon the name of the Lord.” 
Then, when? When family responsibilities be- 
gan to be felt: “And to Seth, to him also there 
was born a son, then men began to call.” Or like 
a text in the following chapter, although the 
author probably did not intend the implication: 
“Enoch walked with God after he begat Methu- 
selah.” With a life destined to live nearly a mil- 
lennium to be influenced (and surely we look for- 
ward to a vaster destiny for our children) a man 
may well company with any wiser Comrade who — 
will teach him what to do for his child. Well, 
there in that passage from St. Luke lies a fruit- 
ful subject in the preacher’s notebook. One day 
he is calling on a man and his wife who are ex- 
ceedingly vague as to what they believe and are 
not finding much in their inherited faith. They 
have obviously secondhand relations with God. 


§ 
. 


PASTORAL PREACHING 121 


They want the best of everything for their chil- 
dren, religion included. Several sudden blows 
have recently clouded the horizon for them, and 
the woman remarks: “Why do things come when 
they are least welcome?” As the minister walks 
down the street, that page in his notebook 
flashes on his mind. <A new title occurs to him: 
“The Sacrament of the Inconvenient.” It was 
late in the evening that the travelling friend 
dropped in, and on the particular night when the 
larder was empty. He can use all that he has 
jotted down about social obligations compelling 
us to seek God, and he has the added point, so 
true in experience, that they come upon us with 
their demands usually when we least want them 
and feel least ready to meet them. Here is the 
Bible interpreting life, and life giving pas as 
to the message of the Bible. 

Or in reading that impersonal and somewhat 
inhuman book of Ezekiel, he has been caught by 
that touching passage on the death of the 
prophet’s wife: “Son of man, behold I take away 
from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke”; 
and he is impressed with the brave, self-con- 
trolled fashion in which the man went on with 
his work: “At even my wife died; and I did in 
the morning as I was commanded.” It is the 
sort of passage upon which no sermon can be 


122 WHAT TO PREACH 


well written save as a preacher is himself moved; 
and it is wisely allowed to remain unused in the 
notebook. But the minister goes about, he is 
thrown again and again with folk on whom sud- 
den strokes of sorrow fall, and he watches how 
they meet them. Perhaps he himself is not un- 
touched by the busy hand of death, and he surely 
is often darkened as he walks with his friends 
through their shadowed valley. Then this cou- 
rageous Old Testament believer’s mastery of 
life’s most desolating experience grips his soul. 
He feels the pathos of it; he is stirred by the 
nobility of the man who consecrates his lonely 
heart-ache to his task, and has himself in hand at 
once for his God-assigned duty. 

Or he has noted that suggestive prayer which 
the Elder John offers for his friend, Gaius: “Be- 
loved, I pray that in all things thou mayest 
prosper and be in health even as thy soul pros-— 
pereth.” As he calls to ascertain why some chil- 
dren have been absent from Sunday School, and 
receives the excuse, common with us, of a certain 
type of parent, that she has kept them out be-— 
cause she hears that there is a great deal of 
measles or grippe or chicken-pox about; and on 
inquiry he learns that these same children attend 
school five days a week, ride in tram-cars and go 
to the “movies’; he cannot forbear asking 


PASTORAL PREACHING 123 


whether the woman thinks that bacilli become 
especially virulent on Sundays and use the house 
of God as a gymnasium all week in which to 
exercise their powers so that they may leap upon 
those unfortunate youngsters who are sent for 
religious education. And as he goes his way, 
partly amused and partly depressed, it dawns on 
him that this is a general attitude towards life: 
children must have their schooling and their fun, 
they may be educated in spirit if nothing more 
entertaining prevents; men must make money 
and have recreation, religion is an extra which 
those with a taste for it put down in their weekly 
menu. He goes back to the Elder John, and 
enters into the discernment and frankness and 
pointedness of his prayer, and gives it after that 
manner to his congregation. 
When a minister begins a week with the feel- 
Ing that he is “preached out,” let him spend an 
afternoon (as many of us are compelled to 
spend four out of every six if we are to overtake 
our visiting list) in going about from family to 
family, and asking himself: “What is the spirit- 
ual need here? What guidance or comfort or 
awakening or sharpening of conscience or enrich- 
ment in God ought this home or this individual 
to receive? Or (more rarely) what suggestion 
from this household or this life can be brought to 





124 WHAT TO PREACH 


the upbuilding of the congregation?” It will 


often happen that the particular person or 
family, of whom one is thinking in writing the 
sermon, will be absent next Sunday. One often 
is disposed to accuse circumstances of perversity 
or Providence of remissness in this matter. But 
preachers discover that when sermons are aimed 
definitely at a specific sin or at the production of 
a clearly portrayed grace, they hit many. One 
cannot say that faithful visiting of itself makes 
good preaching. (Painstaking and constant study 
are indispensable, for these develop insight and 
powers of observation without which mere con- 
tact with people yields little, and they keep the 
mind supplied with stores of truth with which to 
meet the observed needs./ But when in the study 
nothing comes, or comes with that insistency in 
which alone fruitful and forceful sermons are 
written, contact with men and women in the 
intimacy of the friendship accorded a trusted 
pastor will give vitality and point to that which 
before seemed inert. The first and most im- 
portant thing about a sermon is not the subject 
but the object. Whatever the sermon’s genesis 


—and sermons have varied origins, some in texts, 
some in subjects, some in experiences of the 
preacher, some in questions of the hour, some in 
observed needs in the cqngregation—it never is” 


PASTORAL PREACHING 125 


in shape to be preached until the preacher has a 
definite purpose for which he is preaching it. In 
those sermons which rise out of a pastor’s touch 
with his people, the specific object is clear from 
the beginning, and therefore such sermons 
usually are those which are at once felt to be 
helpful. ‘The preacher who combines constant 
reading with constant calling is not likely to have 
his homiletic waters run dry. 
Nor ought a pastor to neglect to ask counsel 
on what to preach from his fellow-workers. 
There are Sunday School teachers in closer 
touch with many of the young people than he is 
likely to be; wise parents who, when given the 
chance, will tell him the temptations to which 
boys and girls are exposed and difficulties they 
encounter in school and at business and in their 
sports and amusements; men and women leading 
clubs or guilds or societies who can supply him 
with lists of topics that need to be dealt with, and 
often with striking illustrative material. If he 
is in a charge where others besides himself are 
visiting in the homes—and happily our churches 
are coming to see that a staff of men and women 
of varied training and gifts, rather than one 
minister, or several ministers with the same edu- 
cation and functions, ought to be employed in 
urban parishes—he will do well to sit down with 


126 WHAT TO PREACH 


them in conference over the needs which they 
and he have discovered, and plan out with them 
sermons or series of sermons for which they will 
furnish him many suggestions. It may seem a 
far cry from a prophet listening in secret to the 
still small voice and coming out of the solitude 
with a burden from the Most High to an admini- 
strator of a parish, gathering his staff about him, 
and eliciting their corporate wisdom on what the 
people should be taught. But God speaks no 
less through experienced and observant and in- 
formed workers than through inspirations which 
well up from the depths of a man’s soul, and a 
preacher who is trying to be a teacher of religion, 
and a teacher of religion which is sufficiently 
many-sided and concretely applied to meet the 
needs of a varied congregation of several hun- 
dreds, and perhaps several thousands, will listen 
attentively for the voice of God from men and 
women as concerned and as responsible as he for 
their spiritual welfare. ‘The sermon, when it 
comes to be preached, will be the man’s own, shot 
through with his individuality, for he is sure to 
select from his colleagues what most appeals to 
him and what he can effectively handle; but he 
will prize fellow-workers who give him their con- 
fidence and frankly tell him what they have 








PASTORAL PREACHING 127 


found lacking in those to whom he and they 
minister. 

Most ministers are not only pastors with per- 
sonal contacts with their people, but also leaders 
of congregations whose corporate life and work 
it is theirs to guide. Protestantism has usually 
stressed the life of the individual with God and 
neglected the social embodiment of religion in 
the Church. This is less true in Scotland than in 
America, with its pathetic multiplication of sects. 
But with you as with us the preacher must hold 
up the ideal of the Christian Church—its neces- 
sity, its mission, its unity, its resources. Much of 
the modern treatment of Jesus passes over 
altogether His churchmanship. It is frequently 
said that He never founded a church nor evinced 
any interest in ecclesiastical organisation. ‘This 
has created the impression that a follower of 
Jesus need not trouble himself about member- 
ship in the church, and that those ministers who 
devote time and thought to parish administration 
and ecclesiastical business are an inferior class of 
clergy, to be tolerated but despised, as many 
citizens look upon professional politicians. ‘The 
free-lance with no responsibility for, or interest 
in, the religious institution is held up as the 
closest modern counterpart of Jesus of Nazareth. 


128 WHAT TO PREACH 


But this is to lose sight of the highly organised 
Church into which He was born, whose fellow- 
ship He prized for the enrichment of His soul, 
and into whose work He threw himself as a 
teacher. His sharp criticism of its leaders and 
His constant controversy with them only bring 
out more clearly how interested He was in the 
institution which He thought they mismanaged 
and misled. 

Preach, and preach sufficiently often, the 
churchmanship of Jesus: His loyalty to the in- 


stitution to which He owed the heritage of Hig 


spirit; His appreciation of its synagogue-serv- 
ices and temple-festivals, even when He found in 
them much that was imperfect and faulty; His 
promptness in investing His own spiritual expe- 
rience in the corporate life of the Church, wit- 
ness the order of the narrative in the gospel 
according to St. Luke where the Baptism and 
Temptation are immediately followed by the re- 
turn to Nazareth and the sermon in the syna- ~ 
gogue, or the account of His taking up His head- _ 
quarters in Capernaum and “straightway,” as _ 
Mark’s breathless narrative relates it, on the Sab- 
bath entering into the synagogue and teaching. 
And whatever view one may take of the histo- 
ricity or verbal accuracy of those passages in St. 
Matthew where the word “church” is placed on 





PASTORAL PREACHING io Lie 


Jesus’ lips, it is indisputable that out of the 
Jewish Church He gathered about Himself a 
group of followers, in whom He developed a 
corporate consciousness, to whom He committed 
His cause and on whom He breathed His Spirit, 
so that He left them a fellowship magnificently 
capable of continuing His purpose. It was an 
admirably skilful and successful piece of organ- 
isation, with no waste effort on premature details 
of government or ritual or creed, details which 
would have cramped rather than aided its future 
growth and its adaptation to the varied life of 
mankind to this hour. St. Paul is not an incor- 
rect interpreter of his Master when he writes, 
“Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up 
for it.” 

Again preach Jesus’ sense of men’s responsi- 
bility for the Church in any age or place. There 
is a striking text in the saying which He uses to 
those who controlled the temple in Jerusalem: 
“Is it not written, My house shall be called a 
house of prayer for all the nations, but ye have 
made it.” He selects from a quantity of Scrip: 
tural ideals the one which sets forth prayer— 
personal intercourse with the Most High—as the 
supreme purpose of the Church; and the one 
which dwells on its inclusiveness—‘“for all the 
nations —a, perpetual rebuke to our class-bound 


130 WHAT TO PREACH 


or race-restricted or creedally narrow or ritually 
rigid or ritually impoverished churches; and He 
insists that the Church with its divine ideal is 
ours to make, with the tragic possibility of mak- 
ing it utterly unlike God’s plan. 

The necessity of making a congregation 
inclusive may be stressed by one whose work 
for a quarter of a century and more has been 
in a city, where not only are the extremes of 
wealth and poverty, of education and illiteracy, 
of culture and crudity, to be faced, but where 
there is a cosmopolitan population from every 
corner of the globe, of whom but one in eight on 
Manhattan Island is entered on the census as a 
Protestant, so that “Ceylon’s isle” of which we 
sing in Heber’s hymn has a larger proportion of 
Protestant communicants among its inhabitants. 
You in Scotland have not our problems in races, 


in a babel of tongues, in vast masses with a 


Roman or a Jewish background, but there are 
few towns even with you where certain classes 
or sets of the population are not unchurched. In 
a lecture on preaching one cannot go into various 
forms of parish work which may open up con- 
tacts and convey the sense of the Church’s in- 
terest and:friendliness. But it is the preacher’s — 
task to make a congregation aware of its failures _ 
to embody to its community the hospitality and 





PASTORAL PREACHING 131 


outgoing friendship of Christ, to keep hammering 
away at the sins of snobbishness and cliquishness, 
of class-pride and class-interest, to plead for 
adaptability instead of rigid conventionalism in 
worship and work into which all churches inevi- 
tably tend to fall, to call on them to be daring in 
risking experiments (surely one new venture a 
year is not too much to ask a congregation to 
be willing to try!) and to insist that no church 
which does not express in its fellowship the inclu- 
sive heart of Christ can represent Him. There 
is a tactless way of talking about social inclusive- 
ness from the pulpit which will make the mem- 
bers of a congregation only more vividly aware 
of social differences. But there is also a way of 
preaching fellowship in Christ, in whom (to use 
a fine phrase in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians) 
“all hold together,” so that a congregation be- 
comes a homelike company of folk of all sorts 
and conditions, a household of the faith and pur- 
pose of Jesus Christ. 

As was said in a previous lecture a principal 
note in the preaching of our generation must be 
social reconciliation. The peril of class warfare 
is as serious as is that of international strife; and 
the two are closely intertwined in their roots. 
The preaching of brotherhood will not be effec- 
tive when the congregations to whom it is de- 


132 WHAT TO PREACH 


livered do not make every effort to incarnate it 
in their own fellowship. This does not mean that 
all the members of a congregation must be con- 
genial, eager to meet socially and with much to 
talk about when they so meet. Differences due 
to temperament, to education, to upbringing, to 
interests, are real differences and constitute 
social barriers. But if religion be not a major 
interest, breaking down or overleaping walls of 
partition and unifying a group of believers in 
mutual honour and understanding, it is not the 

Christian brand of religion found on the pages — 
of the New Testament. Employers and em- 
ployed, university folk and artisans, city visitors 
and dwellers in the mountains or at the seaside, 
whether they have much to say to each other or 
not—and talk is not the sign of the unity of the 
Spirit on which most emphasis is to be placed— 
all have the same need of intercourse with the 
pardoning and renewing and guiding God. 


They can be side by side in their communion with _ 


Him. The Church must be the supreme factor 
for social cohesion; that is part of its God-given 
task; and it can never be that unless in its con- 
gregations men and women who else would never 
meet and appreciate one another are together in 
prayer and in service. 

As ministers we must look over the folk within 


PASTORAL PREACHING 133 


reach of our churches and note carefully those 
groups for whom the church seems to have no 
appeal. We must face our sessions and other 
church-workers with the problem. We must pre- 
pare our people to give up methods of conduct- 
ing the church which render it less welcoming to 
them that are without. In many communities 
rented sittings, for example, and especially sit- 
tings rented at prices varying with the supposed 
desirability of their location, are an offence to 
working folk. We must make our congregations 
willing to try new methods, and methods which 
may not suit their taste, if by any means we may 
gain these unshepherded people. We must be 
ready to give over our own preferred ways of 
preaching and of conducting public worship if 
we find that they do not reach those without 
our ecclesiastical background. When George 
McDonald was beginning his ministry, he wrote 
to his father: “Perhaps my manner is too quiet to 
please dissenters commonly. However, I must 
not do violence to the nature God has given me.” 
To which his father replied, pointing out that his 
maternal grandmother was born duck-footed, 
and he asked: “Was the doctor doing violence to 
the nature God had given her when he set free 
the little toes from their bondage?” Congrega- 
tions must be induced to take on additional serv- 


134 WHAT TO PREACH 


ices, or materially to alter one of those already 
in existence, and in many instances induced to 
increase their contributions to provide for more 
social facilities and for more employed workers, 
in order that the church may serve its entire 
neighborhood. And behind whatever means are 
used must be a clear and cogent preaching of this 
ideal of a comprehensive church, bodying forth 
to the community social solidarity in Christ. If 
we had congregations of that kind all over the 
land, the divisive economic and industrial ques- 
tions of the hour would be discussed in a very 
different atmosphere. ‘The Church of Christ is 
not endowed with specific solutions for these 
problems; but she is commissioned to bring folk 
of all sorts and conditions into such fellowship 
with one another in God that they face their dif- 
ferences with mutual respect and confidence and 
sympathy, and with a supreme desire to serve the 
commonweal. 

Nor must adaptability be thought of only in 
connection with differing social classes. We 
must not let our people or ourselves lose sight of 
inevitable differences to be found in every com- 
munity in types of mind and in matters of taste. 
If church unity is not to be an iridescent dream, 
but realised in parish churches, which in one 
institution serve their entire neighborhood, we 


PASTORAL PREACHING 135 


must prepare office-bearers and people to expect 
a church to supply various types of worship and 
of meetings for discussion and instruction. We 
cannot forecast the forms that will be needed; 
they must grow of themselves, and alter from 
time to time. But it is for us preachers to induce 
our inevitably traditional church folk to welcome 
changes or additions, provided these make the 
church more congenial to religiously wistful out- 
siders. A useful text is Peter’s reply to the 
vision at Joppa: “Not so, Lord, for I have 
never.” <A living and growing church must be 
plastic, adapting itself so far as it can both to 
them that are within and to them that are with- 
out. ‘There is a rich sermon in the text: “Give 
no occasion of stumbling either to Jews (the 
ethically-minded outsiders), or to Greeks (the 
intelligentsia and the esthetes), or to the church 
of God (those who are most developed in their 
touch with the unseen and most sensitive in their 
use of the mind of Christ).” And there is 
another sermon equally needed in our Lord’s 
sense of proportion, who when He was pleading 
for new wine-skins for new wine, remembered 
those who were entirely satisfied with their old 
wine, and bade us recall that they found it 
“good.” 

There are a number of congregational con- 


136 WHAT TO PREACH 


cerns which a preacher must bear in mind and 
handle adequately from the pulpit. One is the 


training of the people in systematic and propor- 


tionate giving. Many preachers shrink from 
what are called “begging sermons.” Unques- 
tionably it is a mistake to ask for money too 
often. A well-known New York minister was 


told by a well-to-do parishioner that while he — 
hoped his pastor would long continue in health 


and vigour, he had selected a text to suggest for 
his memorial sermon, and the text was: “It came 
to pass that the beggar died.”” ‘The minister re- 
plied: “Ah, you must finish the text: ‘and was 


' earried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom: and — 


the rich man also died, and was buried. And in 
Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments.’ ” 


None the less it is a mistake to beg too often; but 

the annual presentation of the church’s budget © 
(if that be your custom, and it is a businesslike ~ 
custom) affords a splendid opportunity to hold 
up before a congregation the ideal of the church © 
in the community, to speak of what their own 
church is doing and might do, to quicken their 


vision, to enlist their service and to evoke their 
generosity. When one thinks of the benefac- 


tions made today by persons of wealth to educa-— 


tion, to hospitals, to various charities, to scientific 


research, to music and art, the amounts given by 


= 
‘ 
j 





PASTORAL PREACHING 137 


them to spread religion appear relatively meagre. 
One is drawn in some congregations to preach 
from the text: “Thou shalt behold the affliction 
of My habitation in all the wealth which God 
shall give Israel.” Probably it is a happy cir- 
cumstance that the Church generally is sup- 
ported not by the large benefactions of the rich, 
but by the constant giving of those of moderate 
means and of the poor. But a larger proportion 
of the total wealth of Christian communities 
ought certainly to go to the spread of convictions 
and ideals. It is the preacher’s task to train a 
congregation to set aside a proportion of their 
incomes or wages, and a proportion which is rep- 
resentative of their devotion to the Church for 
which Christ gave Himself. 

And this leads immediately to another theme | 
—the recruiting of workers for the activities 
carried on by the congregation and by neighbour- 
ing religious and social agencies. We believe 
that it is in a man’s ordinary occupation in life 
that he finds his holy ministry for the kingdom 
of God. But many of our people must take on 
additional service, if the work of Christ is to be 
done. In these days when life has become so 
much more mobile, with week-end jaunts and 
frequent travel, it is not easy to induce our ablest 
people to tie themselves down to tasks which 


138 WHAT TO PREACH 


must be done regularly. Perhaps the most im- 
portant ministry committed to the Church is the 
spiritual training of children and young people. 
Those who volunteer as teachers are frequently — 
persons with scanty education and gifts. It may 
be better with you, but with us it 1s often a source 
of regret that college men and women hold back 
from the arduous and confining work of volun- 
tary religious teaching. A preacher is sent to 
such texts as: “Their nobles put not their necks” 
to the work of their Lord.” “For that the 
leaders took the lead in Israel.” “Very able men 
for the work of the service of the house of God.” 
“To whom much is given, of him shall much be 
required.” ‘There are far too many in all our 
congregations who give of their means, but never 
give of themselves, to lead others into the Chris- | 
tian life. A preacher has to keep telling them 
that in the highest service there is no substitute | 
for self. Il faut payer de sa personne, which we | 
may put into our colloquial speech: “It has to be ? 
taken out of us.” Such work as Paul did at 
Rome in gaining Onesimus for Christ is a repeti- 
tion of the self-emptying of the Incarnation, and 
illustrates that supreme mystery: “Whom I have. 
sent back to thee in his own person, that is, 
my very heart.” Those who teach in Sunday 
Schools or who in any other capacity try to 





| 


PASTORAL PREACHING 139 






mould characters after the likeness of Jesus must 
be faced with the apostle’s bold and apt meta- 
phor: “My little children, of whom I am in 
travail until Christ be formed in you.” All 
spiritual work in the Church is like that of the 
group of Levites to whom no wagons or cattle 
were assigned by Moses: “Unto the sons of 
Kohath he gave none, because the service of the 
‘sanctuary belonged unto them; they bare it upon 
‘their shoulders.” Any who have to do with the 
service of the sanctuary of men’s minds, helping 
them to think through their questions, or of the 
‘sanctuary of their hearts, assisting with sympa- 
thy, or of the sanctuary of their consciences, 
bearing with them their sins and leading them to 
penitence and to clean and vigorous life, can 
be furnished with no labour-saving appliances. 
They must offer themselves in living sacrifice. 
It is a preacher’s duty to press home self-drain- 
ing work for Christ, until those in his congrega- 
tion who excuse themselves from it are made 
exceedingly uncomfortable. 

_ A third duty of the preacher is to inform his 
people ple of the world-wide work of the Church. 
Once a year most ministers preach a missionary 
sermon in connection with an offering or with 
the taking of pledges for the support of the 
Church’s enterprise in non-Christian lands, But 





140 WHAT TO PREACH 


missions surely ought not to be connected always — 
with a collection. They are a very fruitful 


source of instruction for vigorous and devoted 


Christian living. American historians have made — 


am | 


much of the influence of the frontier upon the 
character of our national life. There have 


always been robust and forceful inspirations 


coming back to the more settled sections of the 


country from those rougher places where the 


pioneers were doing their work. It is so in the 
Christian Church. There is no likelier means of © 
rousing a congregation to self-spending service © 
than by keeping before them what their repre- 


sentatives are doing and bearing in non-Chris- 


tian lands. They will be moved to a sense of 


honour akin to that voiced in Uriah’s fine reply to ¥y 


David: “My lord Joab, and the servants of my 
lord, are encamped in the open field; shall I then 
go into my house, to eat and drink?” A preacher — 
will find at least one rich series of biographical — 


sermons in the careers of outstanding mission-— 


aries—of whom sons of Scotland have been 


among the greatest—a series fully as inspiring as 
any on Bible characters, and full of suggestion 


of the reinforcements to be found in God and ~ 
the exploits those who know Him can achieve. 


There is instruction in a series which surveys the 


living religions of the world today, with appre-_ 


PASTORAL PREACHING 141 


ciation of the needs of the soul met by each and 
the truth which it stresses, and the correction and 
consummation of them all in Christ. We are 
living in a time when the so-called heathen are 
among the keenest critics of our faith in its 
national and industrial expressions, or rather 
non-expressions. A preacher finds a telling ap- 
‘proach to some of our social sins in the caustic 
‘comments of those to whom we are sending mis- 
‘sionaries. It is very evident that we must take 
our Christianity much more seriously, or the 
non-Christian world will not take it at all. Peo- 
ple need to be reminded that the Great Commis- 
sion does not read, “Make disciples out of all 
nations,” as though saved individuals were our 
whole mission, but “make the nations disciples.” 
Not only in sermons devoted to missions, but in 
many another sermon, let the people have a 
glimpse of the world-wide ministry of the 
Church, and of the demand this makes on all 
Christians. 

Still another kindred matter for the preacher’s 
attention is to keep before his communicants, 
older and younger, their obligations as members 
of the Christian Church. Most ministers have a 
class in which for several months, or for at least 
a period of weeks, they instruct would-be com- 
municants. But when they take their public 





142 WHAT TO PREACH 


vows, a pastor’s special responsibility for them 
does not end. We spoke a moment ago of the 
corporate consciousness which Jesus developed 
in His disciples, and which fitted them for their 
mission. A similar consciousness of being set 
apart for a distinctive purpose with all-sufficient 
resources at their disposal for its fulfilment 
must be reproduced in the members of the 
Church in every generation. Preachers must 
remind them of their calling in Christ Jesus. It 
will not do to let them take their standards from 
the life about them, nor to think that they have 
no meat to eat which the world knows not of. 
Such phrases as “So shall it not be among you;” 
“What do ye more than others?” “Be not con- 
formed to this world,” ““Hereunto were ye called 
because Christ suffered,” and the like must be 
embedded in their consciences. It is the custom 
of one minister to make the pre-communion 
service at the outset of the season a time when he 
asks by personal letter every young communicant 
who has been received into the fellowship of the 
Church within the last three years to be present, 
and when he takes up the vows they made and 
speaks on some aspect of the distinctive life 
and work and reinforcements of Christians. The 
ideal of the Church given in the metaphors Paul 
uses in his letter to the Ephesians—the Body of | 





PASTORAL PREACHING — 148 


Christ, the Commonwealth of Saints, the Habi- 
tation of the Spirit, the Bride of Christ—or the 
names applied to followers of Jesus in the New 
_Testament—disciples, brethren, believers, saints, 
those of the Way—are typical themes; or some 
large text which sets forth both the privileges 
_and responsibilities of believers. ‘There is always 
-a danger that membership in the Church shall 
mean too little. We do not want it to include 
-any who are not seriously taking for their own 
the mind of Christ towards God and man. 

And this leads to another subject for the 
preacher—the conception of one comprehensive 
Christian Church. Presbyterianism historically 
has had that ideal. Our forefathers at the Ref- 
-ormation planned constitutions for national or 
city churches which were designed to embrace in 
their ministry and membership all whom they 
deemed true Christian ministers and believers. 
They were sometimes mistaken in the tests by 
which they determined worthiness of the Chris- 
tian name; but this was their ideal. Throughout 
our history, however, we have been haunted 
by another conception—that of a witnessing 
Church. The conception is in many respects a 
‘noble one; and we cannot withhold our admira- 
tion from those who through the centuries have 
borne their testimony in the face of hardship and 


144 WHAT TO PREACH 


persecution, and at the cost of parting from — 


brethren. But this witnessing has often been 
attended by an intolerant self-righteousness, by 
an undue emphasis upon opinions and disregard 


of love, and by a divisive spirit. Our Pres- ~ 


byterian history is a succession of splits and re- — 


unions. We in the United States have had al- 


most as many as you have in Scotland. And — 
when one studies dispassionately those in our 


American Presbyterianism (I hazard no judg- 


ment on Scottish Church history), they all seem 


mistakes, which were detrimental to the Church’s ~ 


life and work, and which subsequent generations 


had painfully to repair. Some of them have been ~ 
repaired; and the reunited Church has always — 
made room within herself for both views in the — 
controversy which caused the disruption, showing ~ 
that a like tolerance at the time would have 


rendered the division needless. Today, in a land — 


like my own, one cannot see what distinctive con- 


tribution Presbyterianism as such makes to the 


Christian cause to justify the continuance of a 


separate Presbyterian Church alongside of other 


ote 


churches equally Christian. Canada has taken — 
a stride towards a more inclusive Protestant 
Church, and we cannot help regretting that so 
many Presbyterians have stayed out of the union. | 


The Canadian attempt at a combined Church iq 





PASTORAL PREACHING 145 


seems the most promising sign on the eccles- 


—jastical horizon. But the goal of our hearts’ 





desire is not yet in sight. It is the duty of 
preachers to make possible the coming of the re- 
united world-wide Church of Christ, super-na- 
tional so that she may exercise her function of 
holding mankind in one fellowship, and flexible 
in her organisation to meet the differing require- 
ments of our infinitely varied humanity. Those 


of us who felt the tragic impotence of the Chris- 


tian Church in the crisis of the World War, those 


of us who know at first hand the wasteful and 
crippling folly, of an inevitably competing 


denominationalism, those of us who have had to 
battle for reasonable freedom within our own 
communion and have seen the cruel blunders of 


the deposition from the ministry of eminent and 
_ devout scholars and of the closing of pulpits to 
- God-owned preachers of the Gospel, know the 


urgency of rearing a generation of churchmen 
who count the possession of the Spirit of Jesus 


_ Christ the sole essential, and who frankly expect 


differences of theology and variety in modes of 
worship and vast diversity in methods of work 


within the hospitable Church which His Spirit 


rules and unites. If such a Church is ever to 
bless our earth (and please God it shall) 
preachers dare not keep quiet about it. We 


146 WHAT TO PREACH 


must teach it as the New Testament ideal, which 
it certainly is, and prepare people to hail its 
advent. 

Both for the local congregation and for the 
Church universal the preacher needs to dwell on 
what the seer of Patmos in his message to the 
Church at E;phesus calls “The first works.” He 
praises that Church, you remember, for its mis- 
sionary zeal, its steadfastness under persecution, 
its orthodoxy, but he has this against it: “thou 


didst leave thy first love,” by which he means — 


not loyalty to Christ but love of men. The “first 


works” for a Christian Church are always those 
of love. One recalls that another apostle, writ- 
ing to believers in this same district, prays that 
they may be “rooted and grounded in love.” 
That is the source of insight and the wellspring 


of usefulness and unity. One of the most original — 


and profound theologians Scotland produced in 
the last century, himself a victim of the narrow 
and rigid conception of the Church’s witness 


to its confession, John McLeod Campbell, a 


masterly interpreter of the cross of Christ, wrote 
in his later days :— 


“The clear apprehension of the love of God, as 


God’s revelation of Himself to every man in the 


Atonement—this faith to which I was brought 





PASTORAL PREACHING 147 


soon after I became a minister—saved me from 
an alienation from evangelical religion. I can- 
not now speak of all the ways in which I have 
‘been made to prove the holding power of this 
sheet anchor, but it enabled me to exercise 
patience, and made me quick to hear and slow to 
speak. Secure in this fundamental faith I could 
afford to wait for light on secondary matters. 
Also this grand root faith” (he is using St. 
_ Paul’s very metaphor) “gave me what to teach 
_and what to cherish, and that fellowship in the 
long suffering of God, and His painstaking with 
men, that has so often saved me from breaking, 
or risking a breaking, with others, because of 
anything that was a difference in our measures 
of light. Thus, while called a ‘heretic,’ I have 
_ been saved from the reality of heresy, and have 
_ been enabled ‘to keep the unity of the Spirit in 
_ the bond of peace.’ ” 


That is the temper for us as preachers and 
leaders of the Church, and the spirit we are to 
inculcate in our congregations. 

At no place does a minister’s office supply him 
with more immediately stimulating matter for 
preaching than when he administers the Sacra- 
ment of the Lord’s Supper. Something may be 
said for the observance of this sacrament without 
asermon. The symbols themselves are eloquent, 
and at the Lord’s Table the communicants be- 


148 WHAT TO PREACH 


come preachers, proclaiming the Lord’s death 
until He come. In celebrating the Communion 
in the sick-room or in the home of some shut-in 
one discovers how appropriately the Feast may 
be kept with no word of man save those in prayer, 
and with a selection of warming and strengthen- 
ing words of Scripture. Those of us who served 
with the troops overseas, where most varied 
types of Christian—Quaker, Roman Catholic, 
( Unitarian,y Christian Scientists,\ together with 
the more usual sorts of Evangelicals—would 
meet in the Communion, found it wiser to refrain 
from any address of our own, lest unwittingly 
we intrude something divisive, and we found the ~ 
language of the Bible amply sufficient to stir 
minds and hearts to remember and receive the 
one Saviour and Lord. But for the usual public 
administration of the Lord’s Supper, a brief, 
moving, devout discourse is an aid in creating the — 
spiritual atmosphere, in which souls lift them-— 
selves to God and are aware of His coming to 
them in Christ in His fulness. 

Such sermons ought to be short; fifteen 
minutes is long enough. Communicants ought 
not to arrive mentally wearied at the quiet 
moments of symbolically aided fellowship. The 
sermon should confine itself to vital personal re- 
ligion in the strictest sense. The Lord’s Supper, | 


| 


PASTORAL PREACHING — 149 


at the close of a service occupied with some other 
theme entirely in keeping at other times, is robbed 
of its rightful setting amid the intimacies of 


the Upper Room. The sermon ought not to be 


primarily instructive, however much light it may 


_ throw by the way, for we have other occasions for 
learning, and are now come to experience—to 


realise God’s gracious presence with us in Christ 
and His supply of every need of ours out of His 
unsearchable riches. The sermon ought not to 
deal mainly with our obligations, or even with 
our penitence and faith; for we are not there to 
recall ourselves, but Christ, and the sermon 
should face us with Him. Its purpose is to 
move—to arouse thought, to kindle imagination, 
to touch feeling, to enlist conscience, to commit 
the whole man to Him who gives Himself unre- 
servedly to us. 

Probably you will not find that communion 
sermons are difficult to prepare; certainly they 
are not hard to find, and one is less likely here 
than anywhere else to become “preached out.” 
The symbolism of the Lord’s Supper illustrates 
in a vivid and poignant way almost any text 
which voices the Gospel. One may venture here 
on the greatest texts, texts which are beyond us 
at other times, for we do not attempt to explore 
them but to give glimpses down vistas and up to 


150 WHAT TO PREACH 


heights, and let the minds of communicants pur- 
sue what paths they will towards God as the text 
reveals Him. Its symbolism connects itself with — 
the sacraments of our human life—with home 
and friendship, with suffering and redemption, 
with memory and hope, with sentiment and 
loyalty, with refreshment and replenishment, 
with love that constrains and ennobles and trans- 
figures. It fits in with the sacraments which 
Jesus Himself employed for His soul’s suste- 
nance. Have you ever thought how He went 
from the Upper Room to Gethsemane to use 
there the same elements of which He had made 
for His disciples a sacrament at the Table? 
There was the association of physical objects— 
the garden where He ofttimes resorted. There 
was comradeship with kindred believers—He 
taketh with Him Peter, James and John. There 
was prayer—the upreach of the spirit beyond 
things seen or felt or heard to lay hold on God 
and find strength to do and bear His fatherly 
will. The Lord’s Supper is poetry in action. 
The sermon that puts our souls in tune for it 
must be picturesque throughout, lyric in lan- 
guage, awakening fancy until the eyes of the 
heart are enlightened to see the Invisible. 
Pastoral preaching—it is a clumsy title, to be 
left with another apology for its awkwardness; — 


PASTORAL PREACHING 151 


but let it serve to remind us that a minister's 
other duties, as the pastor and the administrator 
of a church, are not troublesome interferences 
with his work in the pulpit, to be got through with 
as cheaply in time and effort as may be that he 
may give himself to preaching. They are rather 
enrichments of his pulpit work, to be kept im 
their proportionate places, but furnishing him 
with themes, with acquaintance with men, with 
the right to speak with authority, and with re- 
sponsibilities in the Church of God which prove 
themselves inspiring teachers of him who must 
teach his brethren in the household of faith. 





LECTURE V 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 





LECTURE V 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 


As we take up our concluding subject— 
evangelistic preaching—we come clearly upon 
one element which must be present in all preach- 
ing, and which differentiates it from teaching. 
Preaching aims at an immediate result. A 
teacher has as definite an objective, but he 


travels towards it at a more leisurely pace. Not 


. 


every lecture is designed to alter its auditors; but 


_ preaching proposes to make men different. ‘The 


: preacher sets himself to do something in and 
with the persons who sit before him. At the 


start of one’s ministry, it is a good plan, for one’s 
own benefit, to write at the top of one’s manu- 


script what one expects to accomplish with a 
sermon: “To bring fearless serenity through 


trust in a fatherly God;” “To wake to clear 
thinking on God’s claims and to forthright re- 
solve to meet them;” “To present Christ cruci- 


_ fied as the symbol of God’s nature and of the 


life to which His children are called.” ‘The most 
damaging criticism which can be levelled at any 


sermon is that the preacher was aiming at 
155 


156 WHAT TO PREACH 


nothing in particular and proving himself an 
accurate shot. The most telling sermons usually 
have their origin in something which a preacher 
wishes his people to realise or to do. And it is 
never something which he hopes may come to 
pass in them years hence. To be sure, there are 
often unconscionable intervals between spiritual 
seedtime and harvest, and the fruits of many an 
earnest preacher’s ministry do not appear until 
life matures ideas and impulses and loyalties 
which he implanted. But there would be no such 
fruits had not the preacher sent his hearers out 
Sunday after Sunday different by some small 
increment of conscience or by some new direction 
of soul from the men and women who entered the 
church. 

A preacher is one who teaches religion to make 
his listeners forthwith religious. He has life to 
impart which should be immediately contagious. 
There is ever a note of urgency in preaching, 
That was what Baxter had in mind when he 
spoke as “a dying man to dying men.” Both 
vpreacher and people should expect something to 
happen, and something momentous, because they 
face each other for half an hour, while he faces 
himself and them with the living God in Christ. 
Phillips Brooks, in a memorable phrase, de- 
scribed preaching as “truth through person- 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING ~~ 157 


ality ;” but his description omits an indispensable 
factor—the immediate object. Preaching is 
truth through personality to constrain con- 
sciences at once. 

To that extent all preaching worthy the name 
is evangelistic—specifically intended to make 
disciples of those who hear it. But inasmuch as 
most congregations are largely composed of 
those who in varying degrees are already fol- 
lowers of Christ, not all preaching is aimed at 
commitment to Him. Preachers should bear in 
mind the occasional outsider who may happen in, 
or the perfunctory church-goer who sits listlessly 
through the service, and put something into most 
sermons for their special benefit. But there is 
a danger in too frequent appeals to close with 
Christ. They must never become a convention 
with the preacher himself, for he must be 
genuinely moved if he is to move others; and 
congregations soon reach a saturation point and 
cease being affected. 

- But every church has an obligation to non- 
Christians within its reach. There are young 
people who have been brought up without re- 
ligious training, and others who have revolted 
from the unwise or faulty form in which they 
received it, or have drifted out of touch with 
church or Sunday School. There are men and 


158 WHAT TO PREACH 


women in middle life or old age morally un- 
awakened and empty in soul. There are those 
who have lapsed from an earlier faith, or have 
been carried by circumstances into unreligious — 
circles of thought and feeling. And there are - 
the victims of tragedies, both those who have 
been their own enemies and those who have been 
shipwrecked by the folly or wrong-doing of 
others. Few churches today have not far more 
folk around them than are ever within their 
walls. 

When a minister is planning his year’s work, 
he cannot close his eyes to these who are not 
likely to come to hear him unless means are taken 
to get hold of them. He and his office-bearers — 
may arrange a series of special services. Some-— 
times the church will be used; and sometimes — 
another building, like a theatre or hall, seems 
more neutral territory. This is not the place to 
go into the methods of evangelism; we are con- 
cerned with the preaching only. ‘Occasional 
the pastor can take such a series of services him- 
self; more often he will find it wise to invite in | 
another speaker, because the people are ac- ‘ 
customed to his own message, and a stranger 
puts the Gospel freshly and releases the pastor 
to devote himself to personal calls and inter- 
views. Such missions, which run for a week or 





EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 159 


a fortnight or even for a longer period, bring 
religion conspicuously to the attention of a com- 
munity. ‘They have a cumulative effect. ‘They 
supply an occasion for earnest Christians to 
speak with indifferent neighbours or kinsfolk and 
get them within range of the Christian message. 
Or the minister may take his more active workers 
into his confidence, and let them know that for a 
certain number of Sunday mornings or evenings 
he will focus his preaching on a presentation of 
Christianity to the non-Christian or the very 
slightly Christian, and obtain their assistance in 
procuring the attendance of those seldom at 
church. 

_ Whether the pastor be himself the preacher, 
or some other minister be invited, it is important 
that the preaching be free from the defects which 
have deservedly brought evangelism widely into 
disrepute :— 

(1) Its message has been associated with a 
negative ethic. There have been flaming denun- 
ciations of current vices; and these have worked 
for righteousness; but there have also been often 
as uncompromising attacks upon popular forms 
of amusement which in themselves are not vicious 
—dancing, the stage, various sports—with a con- 
sequent moral confusion. And denunciations of 
evil have been commoner than proclamations of 


160 WHAT TO PREACH 


the more excellent way. The impression gets — 
abroad that an earnest Christian is to be known 
by what he does not do. No doubt evil lends 
itself more readily to dramatic speech than good, 
and criticism is easier than constructive teaching; 
Aut an evangel which is not positive in its setting 
forth of the life of love is not the evangel of 
Jesus. The preacher who is but little in the 
kingdom of heaven is greater than the most 
doughty assailant of sin. 

(2) Again its message is far too often tied up 
with an obsolete theology. Allowance must be 
made for evangelists who have been so engrossed 
in bringing sinners to Christ by the Gospel in its 
traditional form that they have had neither time 
nor inclination to readapt its presentation in the 
light of more recent scholarship. So long as they 
are tolerant in spirit, one would utter no syllable 
of criticism of their splendid service. Indeed our 
criticism should be reserved for men of modern 
theological training who lack evangelistic interest 
and seem impotent to preach convertingly. But 
it is not impossible to combine keen thinking and 
fervent passion. One recalls the outstanding 
heralds of Christ through the centuries, who have 
turned communities upside down and enthroned 
Christ over selfish lives—a Paul, an Augustine, 
a Francis, a Wiclif, a Luther, a Calvin, a 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 161 


Knox, an Edwards, a Chalmers—and they were 
theological innovators, men with a fresh grasp of 
the Gospel in the light of the knowledge of their 
day, as well as men of an ardent devotion to 
Christ. The most serious reproach of those who 
pride themselves on being abreast of current 
advances in thought is that so pitiably few of 
them use their learning to preach Christ infec- 
tiously and transformingly. 

(3) A third and closely allied defect in recent 
evangelistic preaching has been the vagueness of 
its goal. Men have been pled with to “accept 
Christ” without being told what that means. 
They have understood it to involve eschewing 
gross indulences like unchastity and drunken- 
ness, conforming to current social standards of . 
righteousness, holding the generally accepted 
Christian beliefs and loyally cultivating the ec- 
clesiastical virtues such as Sabbath observance, 
church-going and private devotions. But admir- 
able as all this is, it is scarcely what the 
New Testament means by being “found in 
Christ” with a heart wrapped up in the right- 
eousness of the kingdom of heaven. To what are 
men converted, saved, born again? what is the 
more abundant life?—that is the essential point. 
It must be made clear in any evangelistic preach- 
ing which merits the Christian name. 


162 WHAT TO PREACH 


(4) And a fourth criticism, to which this at 
once leads, is that it has been too individualistic. 
Its preachers have visualised souls as isolated 
units, instead of seeing human beings in their 
social relations. It has preached Christ apart 
from the kingdom of God which He preached 
and for which He died. Its converts have not 
infrequently been poor citizens, unpleasant rela- 
tives and sharp dealers in business affairs. It is 
as necessary to preach fidelity as to preach faith; 
or rather, not to set forth social responsibilities is 
to omit the most cogent spur to religion and to 
leave closed the only door by which many persons 
will ever enter fellowship with God. Some men — 
find God through their social obligations, and 
others come to assume social obligations by first 
finding God. Side by side in successive verses in 
the genealogy of our Lord in St. Matthew’s Gos- 
pel are two women, outsiders to the religion of 
Israel, who entered the household of faith 
through opposite doors. Rahab, the harlot and 
traitress of her city, came through faith—a 
mystic sense of the Divine behind the invaders of 
Jericho, and Ruth, the devoted daughter-in-law, 
came through faithfulness, and it is the Ruths 
whom evangelists forget. A message which does 
not set forth the Christian social order and win > 
men to be its devotees omits half the Gospel. 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 163 


Whatever may have been the insight in her 
spiritual nature which led Rahab to welcome the 
enemies of her people, she, the harlot, is at length 
the wife of one of the progenitors of David and 
his greater Son. 

Evangelism, which is the supreme duty of the 
Christian preacher, ought not to be left to men 
of lesser educational advantages, who are more 
apt to interpret the Gospel in these imperfect, 
and sometimes misleading, ways. God forbid 
that we should not acknowledge with profound 
thanksgiving the marvellous service rendered 
by evangelists of scanty culture but large com- 
mon sense and glorious consecration. Yet it is 
a task which trained ministers dare not demit, 
however readily we welcome those from time to 
time raised up with special gifts although with- 
out fullest education. We must expect so to 
enlist our people and lead our church’s efforts 
that part of our time every year we are facing 
lives not under the sway of Christ and preaching 
with the definite aim of gaining their allegiance. 
. Nor dare we lay exclusive stress on preaching. 
Success depends even more on the extent to 
which minister and people prepare for and fol- 
low up the work of the pulpit by personal talks 
with men and women. There is no substitute for 
the interview face to face. Nor can the first 


164 WHAT TO PREACH 


approach to many elements in our population be 
made through an invitation to some large meet- 
ing; they are much more effectively reached 
through small gatherings in a home or in a, club- 
room. Here as in so many other relations one 
cannot sunder the work of the preacher from the 
task of the pastor who deals with individuals and 
the leader of his people who inspires and guides 
them to bring lives one by one under Christ’s 
control. 


But all this is auxiliary to a public presenta- — 


tion of the Gospel. And when a preacher pre- 
pares for this duty, what kind of sermon will he 
preach? 

First, he will select great and moving themes: 
—great themes which take men into the heart of 
the Christian faith. It is a not uncommon mis- 


take to fancy that evangelistic preaching should 


not tax men’s intellects but warm their emotions. 
One has heard evangelists who strung a series 
of anecdotes on the slenderest thread of thought. 


Anecdotes which illustrate the subject are by no : 


means to be disparaged, but one pleads for a sub- 
ject worth illustrating. Or there is the evangel- 
istic sermon which is a continuous appeal, “a 
gush of feeling in a rush of words.” Benjamin 
Whichcoate voiced the experience of thoughtful 
hearers when he said: “I have always found such 


ee 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 165 


preaching of others hath most commanded my 
heart which hath most illuminated my head.” 
Historically the revivals of Christian faith have 
all been associated with the preaching of some 
mighty conviction. Preaching that would bring ' 
men to decision must grip the mind. Let the 
preacher choose for evangelistic sermons the 
most august and mastering religious thought he 
knows. 

And moving themes. Someone described 
preaching as “truth carried: into the heart by 
passion; and the passion must be not only in the 
preacher, but in the subject of his discourse. Let 
him choose an affecting message. We need not 
be afraid of too much emotion provided the 
theme itself does the moving. Many of us find 
Dr. Channing confessing that of which our con- 
sciences accuse us when he enters in his diary: 
“I am sensible of a want of tenderness in my 
preaching. I want to preach striking, rather 
than melting, sermons.” Whether we speak of 
them as melting or as kindling, we want subjects 
which raise men’s natures to a high temperature, 
for only at that heat are they malleable, and will 
receive the impress of Christ. 

Every generation has points of insensibility 
and does not respond to certain appeals of Chris- 
tianity which have gone home to the conscience 


166 WHAT TO PREACH 


of other periods. Nor would one venture to say 
what elements in the Christian message most stir 


the men of our time. But by way of illustration — 


we may look at several approaches to the hearts 
of our contemporaries. 

One is a clear portrayal of the spiritual altern- 
atives. What is the prospect for the individual 
and for society on a non-Christian basis? Sup- 
pose the materialistic interpretation of life seem 
convincing, let a man look its implications 
honestly in the eyes. You recall Jean Paul 


Richter’s dream, in which he fancies the dead — 
Christ returning to say that there is no God, and > 


you have read James Thomson’s The City of 
Dreadful Night. Or listen to a man of a very 
different type, one who constantly brought 
laughter to men’s faces, Mark Twain, as he con- 
templates life seriously :— 


“A myriad of men are born; they labor and 
sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and 
scold and fight; they scramble for little mean 
advantages over each other. Age creeps upon 
them; infirmities follow; those they love are 
taken from them. At length ambition is dead; 
pride is dead; longing for release is in their place. 
It comes at last—the only unpoisoned gift earth 
ever had for them—and they vanish from a world 
where they were of no consequence. ‘Then 





EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 167 


another myriad takes their place, and copies all 


they did, and goes along the same profitless road, 
and vanishes as they vanished—to make room for 
another and another and a million more myriads 
to follow the same arid path through the same 
desert and accomplish what the first myriad and 
all the myriads that came after it accomplished 
—nothing.” 


Let a preacher as vividly confront compla- 
cent unbelievers with the logic of their position. 
Are they willing to live by it? to have their chil- 
dren live by it? to see the community basing its 
life upon it? If it be true, one should not whine 
nor protest but follow out the consequences 
open-eyed. But can one settle down into this 
view of existence? If not, why? Against this 
background let the preacher place the spiritual 
nature of man:— 


Strange that we creatures of the petty ways, 

Poor prisoners behind these fleshly bars, 

Can sometimes think us thoughts with God 
ablaze, 

Touching the fringes of the outer stars. 


Then let him as vividly sketch the life fol- 
lowers of Christ discover through Him in this 
same universe which others proclaim godless, and 
plead for a serious attempt to give life the trust 


168 WHAT TO PREACH 


and service of Christ, and see whether there be 
not a response which vindicates His faith. 
Another is a plain and graphic statement of 
the results of sin, and an equally plain and 
graphic statement of the life to which man is 
redeemed by Christ. It is not an approach 
peculiar to our time, but one for which our time 
has been specially prepared by an experience of 
a world-judgment. General William Booth 
said: “The best preaching is Damnation with the — 
cross in the midst of it.” Let the preacher paint — 
concretely the effects of Christless motives on — 
homes and industry and politics, and on the 
characters of men—that is Damnation, here or 
hereafter. You may recall the sentences in 
which our veteran novelist, ‘Thomas Hardy, dis- 
misses the two clerical brothers as negligible 
factors in those scenes of human pathos and 
tragedy through which Clare and Tess are pass- 
ing: “Perhaps as with many good men their 
opportunities of observation were not as good as 
their opportunities of expression. Neither had © 
an adequate conception of the complicated forces 
at work outside the smooth and gentle current on 
which they and their associates floated.” No one 
would demand that ministers be swept on a 
rough and flooding torrent; they could not do a 
tithe of their expected stint of work. But mov- — 





EVANGELISTIC PREACHING ~~ 169 


ing abroad in life where we see men and women 
shipwrecked, and wrecking themselves, we can- 
not help preaching damnation: “The wages of 
sin is death,” “Without God and without hope”; 
and as ministers of Christ preaching: “The free 
gift of God is eternal life,” “The God of hope fill 
you with all joy and peace in believing.” 

Still another approach is the naturalness of 
faith, You will remember the passage in 
Stevenson’s H'bb Tide where Herrick resolves to 
let himself down into the water and drown, and 
finds that he cannot stop swimming. An irre- 
sistible instinct compelled him to move his hands 
and his feet and keep afloat. The patriarch of 
Uz discovered a similar imperious impulse of 
spiritual self-preservation when, convinced that 
God was against him, he could not refrain from 
praying, and said in justification of his seeming 
folly: ““Howbeit doth not one stretch out the 
hand in his fall?’ Let men see themselves in 
situations where they cannot help reaching out 
and up. After his wife’s death Leslie Stephen 
wrote to Mr. Lowell: “I thank—” and remem- 
bering that he had no God, went on, “I thank— 
something—that I loved her as heartily as I know 
how to love.” Let them see others to whose 
forced cry answers came, and who were made 
more than conquerors. Herrick’s impulse to 


170 WHAT TO PREACH 


swim had behind it ages of experience in which ~ 
creatures had found this the means of remaining 
alive in the water. Job’s instinctive outreach of 
soul for fellowship with the Invisible had behind 
it a like ancestry. Is this not cogent proof that 
man’s spirit finds faith life-preserving, and in 
faith takes hold of upbearing reality—the living 
God? Why sink and perish with such help at 
hand? Why stumble and fall when with God 
one can walk upright? 

Or another approach is the corresponding 
truth of the inescapable God. Men are con- 
tinually attempting to elude Him; but do 
they ever succeed? Through thought, through 
beauty, through conscience, through love, how 
He breaks in upon them! One of our brilliant 
younger New York architects underwent sud- — 
den tragic disaster in the death of his wife, and — 
shortly thereafter published a sonnet in which he 
pictures Beauty as saying :— 


He that keeps faith with me will surely find 
My substance in the shadows on the deep, 
My spirit in the courage that men keep 
Though all the stars burn out and Heaven goes 
blind. 
When sorrow smites thee, look! my joy is 
near, 
Flashing like sunlight on a falling tear. 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 171 


How supremely all these appeals seem summed 
up in Christ! Can we wrench ourselves away 
from Him, and have done with Him? If one 
cannot elude this haunting Figure, how can He 
be let find us and made Friend and Saviour and 
Lord? 

Yet another approach is the sense of futility. 
It is often remarked that few persons nowadays 
are conscious of guilt and that most only rarely 
crave communion with the Unseen; but countless 
men and women, even in youth and more in- 
tensely as years advance, are dogged by a feeling 
of their uselessness. ‘The lost coin, out of circula- 
tion, seems the symbol of themselves to more men 
than the lost sheep or the lost son. The pessimism 
of much of our current fiction, and the depression 
revealed in the published letters or personal 
utterances of many of those rated successful, is 
witness of this mood. Let the preacher present 
Christ as the Interpreter who gives life meaning, 
and the Utiliser of all one’s powers. A second- 
century Christian used a significant phrase when 
he described faith to his friend, Diognetus, as 
“this new interest which has entered men’s lives.” 

Or again one may present the Christian pro- 
gramme for the world and for the individual. It 
has usually been assumed that men are first won 
by Christ’s person and ther. adopt His purpose: 


172 WHAT TO PREACH 


but there are not a few today who are first drawn 
to the cause, and then to Him as the Leader who 
can achieve it. Such a sermon must handle very 
specifically what Christ proposes, and men must 
be made to see life as He wills it. If this be that 
which they also will, if this has their heart even — 
when their will is weak, can they hold back and — 
can they refuse to be partners with Him? 

Or the preacher may take for his theme the ~ 
satisfactions of the life with Christ—the combina- — 
tions of venture and security, of living at one’s © 
wit’s end and of being guided, of facing the im- 
possible and feeling adequate, of isolation and ~ 
friendship with God. And this is but a frag- — 
mentary glimpse of “the joy of the Lord” into © 
which the disciple is admitted. | 

In a previous lecture it was said that the cross — 
was the supremely cogent appeal. The re- © 
crudescence in our time of the demand for self- — 
expression, of the protest against irksome obli- — 
gations, makes its message an offence. The — 
impossibility of attaining the ideal to which it — 
constrains leads to rebellion of spirit. A con- 4 
temporary poetess has voiced this admirably, and 4 
the invincible might which triumphs. The lines — 
are not yet in our anthologies, and may perhaps : 
be unfamiliar. PANT AS ELKUSO, she en- — 
titles them:— f 





EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 173 


Go, bitter Christ, grim Christ! haul if Thou wilt - 
Thy bloody cross to Thine own bleak Calvary! 
When did I bid Thee suffer for my guilt 

To bind intolerable claims on me? 

I loathe Thy sacrifice; I am sick of Thee. 


They say Thou reignest from the cross, Thou 
dost, 

And like a tyrant. Thou dost rule by tears, 

Thou womanish Son of woman. Cease to thrust 

Thy sordid tale of sorrows in my ears, 

Jarring the music of my few short years. 


I am battered and broken and weary and out of 
heart, 

I will not hear of talk of heroic things, 

But be content to play some simple part, 

Freed from preposterous, wild imaginings . . . 

Men were not meant to walk as priests and kings. 


Thou liest, Christ, Thou liest; take it hence, 

That mirror of strange glories; I am I: 

What wouldst Thou make of me? O cruel 
pretence, 

Drive me not mad with the mockery 

Of that most lovely, unattainable lie! 


O King, O Captain, wasted, wan with scourging, 

Strong beyond speech, and wonderful with woe, 

Whither, relentless wilt Thou still be urging 

Thy maimed and halt that have not strength to 
Os. 

Peace, peace, I follow. Why must we love Thee 
so? 


174 WHAT TO PREACH 


These few approaches, at which we have been 
hastily looking, may serve to illustrate the point 
of starting with a subject which ieads us to the 
heart of the Christian faith. Preachers are often 
surprised at the sermons which appear to pro- 
duce immediate decisions. ‘Those carefully pre- 
pared for the purpose frequently fail, while those 
which had other ends in view seem to touch an 
answering chord in some listener and to bring 
him to resolute action. People’differ widely in 
that to which they respond; and preachers never 
know the silent work of the always active Spirit 
of God, for which the best we say is only the most 
fractional supplement. But experience teaches 
us that it is the big themes, which afford large 
glimpses of God in Christ and which go down 
into the depths of conscience and unloose the 
usually repressed flow of sentiment, which shake 
men out of their lethargy and impel them to- 
decisive courses. 

Second, he will seek a haunting or a wooing 
text. To be sure if he be preaching to a company 
of non-church-goers in an unecclesiastical en-— 
vironment—a theatre or a park or a street- 
corner—there is much to be said for beginning 
with a story or with a contemporary happening 
which is in their minds, rather than with a verse 
of the Bible. But even so, he will usually find 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING ~~ 175 


some. pointed Scripture invaluable to fasten in 
their minds. And if he be preaching in a church 
where a text is the expected commencement of 
the sermon, he will look for one that will grip his 
hearers the moment he reads it. 

Suppose he is after fairly constant church- 
goers who have never found in their religion 
deliverance from their moral infirmities, and who 
remain in helpless invalidism while apparently 
within reach of the springs of healing, what a 
text lies at his hand in the verse: “And a certain 
man was there who had been thirty and eight 
years in his infirmity.” The evangelist may well 
have been thinking of those who had been fre- 
quenters of some cult in Ephesus or hearers at a 
synagogue, when he stressed this man’s long and 
disappointed waiting. He pictures Jesus pass- 
ing by others and going straight for him. He 
gives us the man’s pathetic explanation so often 
repeated in the experience of others, “Sir, I have 
no man to put me into the pool.” And in Jesus’ 
threefold saying, bidding the man in faith use at 
once his own long paralysed powers, “Arise;” do 
away with the possibility of relapsing into his 
invalidism, “Take up thy bed;” and instead of 
beginning with a convalescent’s timid first ef- 
forts, start off at the pace of vigorous health: 
“Walk’—there is the whole process of cure. 


176 WHAT TO PREACH 


Whether the preacher employs ail the context— 
and in this incident it is hard to see how he could 
do better—the text at once arrests and is cal- 
culated to remain in the memory: “A certain 
man was there who had been thirty and eight 
years in his infirmity.” 

Or suppose the preacher has in mind those who 
slip from childhood into young manhood, and 
from young manhood into middle years, with an 
interest in the Christian religion, but never tak- 


ing seriously Christ’s demands upon them, how ~ 


poignantly true in their experience he can make 
the text: “Me ye have not always.” “Lo, I am 
with you alway’—yes, but our impressibility 
comes and goes. The Christ who appeals to chil- 
dren, the Christ who meets us on the threshold 
of responsible life, the Christ who comes to us in 
our various experiences—love, perplexity, sor- 
row, shame—comes saying: “Not always.” Let 
him take those two words and toll them like a 
bell, until they ring in the conscience of those 


who put off the decisive act of self-commitment — 


to Christ. 
Or suppose he is thinking of those for whom 


the Christian religion is associated with stodgy 


folk and static morals, solidly good but never 
thrilling, and wishes to present to them the life 


with Christ as a daring adventure, how memor- — 





EVANGELISTIC PREACHING | 177 


ably what he wishes to lodge in their minds is 
phrased in the modern rendering of Peter’s de- 
scription of Jesus as “the Pioneer of life.” The 
relative novelty of the association of that idea 
with Christ and the richness of the word itself are 
enough for his hearers to carry away. Let him 
preach so as to illustrate and not spoil the text, 
and he has done all that is necessary. 

Or suppose he is trying, perhaps with a little 
irony, to get beneath the skin of the clever and 
complacent, who fancy themselves making a suc- 
cess of life without God, and who dispense with 
the scruples of a Christian conscience as anti- 
quated and hampering, how apt and pointed is 
Isaiah’s comment to similar folk in Jerusalem: 
“Yet He also is wise.” Quite likely the preacher 
need not expect instantaneous results from any 
sermon preached to such superior and self-as- 
sured persons. Only bitter experience can 
humble them into a teachable frame. But he may 
manage to write upon the walls of their minds a 
saying which will stand out in fiery letters when 
the crash comes and point them to whom they 
can turn for guidance: “Yet He also is wise.” 

Or take such challenging words of Jesus, 
spoken to the same types of persons as we con- 
front Sunday after Sunday: “Wouldest thou be 
made whole?” ‘Have I been so long time with 


178 WHAT TO PREACH 


you, and yet—?” “What is that to thee? follow 
thou Me.” Such texts stick in the memory and 
hound men. One needs texts from which people 
cannot run away. 

But we used the other adjective “wooing,” be- 
cause in experience Christ draws as well as pur- 
sues. Such texts are more difficult to employ, 
and a preacher not unnaturally shrinks from 
them. They are in themselves so appealing that 
he fears to weaken their effect by adding words 
of his own. All words or explanations seem 
paltry beside them. “Come unto Me all ye that 
labour and are heavy laden,” “God is love,” 
“Greater love hath no man than this,’ “God 
commendeth His own love toward us, in that 
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 
The preacher may well let his sermon lead up to 
them, rather than start off with them. ~'This pre- 
vents an anticlimax. 

Or he can commence with some human situa- 
tion, and then introduce them. For example, 
Mrs. Humphry Ward in her Recollections tells 
how in the later ’seventies she met Walter Pater 
at Oxford and, reckoning on his sympathy, said 
that orthodox Christianity “could not long main- 
tain itself against its assailants, and that we 
should live to see its breakdown.” He shook his 
head and looked rather troubled. “I don’t think 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 179 


so,” he said. ‘Then, with hesitation: ““And we 
don’t altogether agree. You think it’s all plain. 
But I can’t. There are such mysterious things. 
Take that saying, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that are 
weary and heavy laden.’ How can you explain 
that? There is a mystery in it—something 
supernatural.” 

Such an introduction supplies a background 
for the text. That, after all, is the way in which 
the words were first used. Jesus, or John, or 
Paul, was moved by man’s need and the amazing 
Divine response when he first uttered them. It 
is taking them out of their original mood to read 
them off in the necessarily cold first minute when 
preacher and people are beginning the sermon. 
It may be that they contain enough fuel in them- 
selves and are so instantly combustible that they 
blaze up and warm preacher and hearers; but 
often they seem to come more appropriately 
after the preacher has told an incident or sketched 
a human situation, and broken the cake of con- 
vention or the crust of indifference in which a 
congregation’s feelings are encased, and on their 
more tender mood lets fall these words of grace. 

We have been insisting on great and moving 
themes; we must have texts to match them. But 
there are texts which express the theme but lack 
picturesqueness or pungency. One seeks a 


180 WHAT TO PREACH 


phrase which can both dog the mind and charm 
it, a text which haunts and woos. 


will try for language which makes his hearers 
see. All works of art—and a sermon is one of 
the highest forms of literary creation—awaken 
\ the imagination. A moving speaker turns men’s 
ears into eyes. ‘They are made to see life’s situ- 
ations, and situations which lie in the realm of the 
spirit, and made to feel themselves in them. ‘The 
language which a preacher wants is that of 
novelists and poets and dramatists, and of writers 
of letters and of autobiography, who capture and 
exhibit the workings of the mind and heart. He 
has to avoid the abstract, and for this reason he 
must rid himself not only of the jargon of theo- 
logical lecture-rooms and of most of his scholarly 


books, but also of their unimaginative way of 


putting things. He must shun such prosaic and 
pedestrian forms and expressions as these lec- 
tures are cast in. Indeed the lecturer is aware 
that you have probably characterised them as 
“soup stock for sermons.’ We use our best china 
to serve our guests the fully prepared and 
flavoured soup, but the stock is kept in a plain 
crock. The form and speech which perforce have 
been employed in speaking of the contents of 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING > 181 


preaching will not do for a congregation whose 
appetite must be sharpened and whose taste 
satisfied. It is the attractive china, and above 
all the seasoning, for which we are pleading. 

In one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prefaces 
is a counsel to authors which is equally applicable 
to preachers: “What he cannot vivify he should 
omit.” Part of the vivification is in a man’s 
voice and manner and presence; but what is not 
vividly written can scarcely be made to live by 
the earnestness or passion of delivery, and what 
is alive on the written page kindles the speaker. 
Edmund Gosse describes Ibsen’s preparation for 
his creative work as “incessant observation of 
real life, incessant capture of unaffected, uncon- 
sidered phases, actual living experience leaping 
in his hands like a captive wild animal.” This 
is what the preacher, and particularly the 
preacher who, like the dramatist, is seeking an 
immediate response in awakened emotions that 
drive the will, must seek. We have to paint life’s 
occurrences so that our hearers seem to them- 
selves to be living through them. We have to 
take out of their mouths the phrases they use. 
We have to carry them down deeper than they 
usually peer for themselves, and show them their 
passions and inclinations, their motives and crav- 
ings, their misgivings and aspirings, as these 


182 WHAT TO PREACH 


surge up and struggle, are repressed and surge 
again, in the volcanic crater of the human soul. 

‘\ Style is partly a moral quality—a resolve to 
portray what one feels so that one’s hearers feel 
it, an abnegation of slovenly and slipshod diction, 
a refusal to clutter up sentences with phrases 
which do not stand for actualities, a passion for 
the exact and comely word. And it is partly a 
gift of the imagination, bestowed in varying 
measures, sometimes dulled and sometimes en- 
hanced by culture. A preacher, who is also 
pastor and administrator, cannot spend unlimited 
time on the composition of his sermons. He us- 
ually writes them under pressure, and probably 
they are more effective when so penned. He must 
acquire the habit of expressing his mind in forth- 
right, lucid and touching speech. Joubert said 
that “to write well a man should have a natural 
facility, and an acquired difficulty.” Perhaps 
one may put it for our calling that a preacher 
should have a vehement desire to say what he in- 
tensely cares about and an exacting conscience 
and taste which make it hard for him to satisfy 
himself with its expression. He cannot afford the 
time to be fussy and finicky with his work: that 
would spoil it. It was said of John Muir, the 
charming and enlightening interpreter of our 
American forests and mountains and glaciers, 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 183 


cradled in Scotland, that he polished his articles 
“until an ordinary man slips on them.” John 
Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrims at Ley- 
den, said bluntly: “As a woman overcuriously 
trimmed is to be suspected, so is a speech.” ‘The 
sense of unaffected reality may be ironed out of 
asermon. Let aman have the feel of people be-' 
fore him as he sits at his desk, and then let him 
write it speakingly, and go over it only to excise 
repetitions and substitute a more telling word 
and render entirely plain what may be obscure. 
But if he writes it speakingly, he must remember 
to keep seeing whereof he writes and put it down 
so that others too will see. 

This is the value of illustration. Often the 
text is itself a picture. The characters of the 
Bible, almost always portrayed by its writers with 
a skill that reveals them in the briefest possible 
compass, are invaluable means of helping people 
to see their spiritual selves. Take the stance 
of the woman with a malady, about which she 
would naturally feel sensitive, who pushed her 
way to Jesus in the crowd—and what a help her 
story is when one is preaching on overcoming 
obstacles in reaching Christ. There are outward 
hindrances represented by that packed mass of 
human beings; there are hindrances in one’s 
own condition—think of her physical weakness; 


184 WHAT TO PREACH 


there are hindrances in one’s own mind, repre- 
sented by her long, disheartening chapter of 
futile attempts with many physicians and her 
womanly shrinking from publicly disclosing her 
disease; there are hindrances in Christ Himself, 
who will not let her go unnoticed, but stops and 
insists upon her coming forward before those 
hundreds of staring eyes and telling what has 
happened. The analytic insight in this livingly 
reported story on the evangelists’ pages furnishes 
the preacher with the standard and the material 
with which to picture the obstacles his hearers — 
face and with which to help them to a like over- 
coming faith. 

And he must collect illustrations indefatigably. 
A preacher is far likelier to run short of illustra- 
tions than of texts, and the average hearer would 
more willingly forego the text than the illustra- 
tion. ‘To be sure, there are illustrations and 
illustrations. Every preacher must make his 
index expurgatorius of hackneyed anecdotes and 
threadbare metaphors and outworn quotations. 
And if he—lucky wight!—has gathered a rich 
store of fairly fresh material, let him beware of 
lugging in a good story with only a tenuous con- 
nection with the point he is using it to illustrate. 
But with this proviso that the preacher discrimi- 
nate and have an unerring eye for relevancy in 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 185 


the matter of illustration, one cannot urge its 
necessity too strongly in all preaching, and par- 
ticularly in evangelistic preaching. It is the’ 
human incident vividly told which touches men’s 
hearts. Itis the homely simile which makes plain 
the profoundest spiritual truth. 

Suppose one wants people to understand that 
in the last analysis faith is a venture, a trusting 
one’s self utterly to God, take the analogy of 
learning to float. You tell a small boy that if 
he will relax his body and fling himself in the 
most helpless posture—on his back with out- 
stretched arms and upturned palms on the water 
—he will be upborne. So the devout of all ages 
bid us cast ourselves on God. But if you have 
tried to teach a little boy to float, you have dis- 
covered how difficult it is to induce him not to 
keep at least one toe touching the bottom or not 
to hold his neck up stiffly to ensure his face from 
being lapped by ripples. You insisted: “You 
must let yourself go.” Possibly he trusted you 
so entirely that what you told him to do, he did. 
More likely you had to say: “Watch me,” and 
you abandoned yourself to the seemingly so un- 
stable water, and perhaps then the boy was ready 
to follow your example. But probably the first 
time you had to promise that you would hold 
your arms underneath him, and if he began to 


186 WHAT TO PREACH 


sink he could count on your support. Does not 
Christ in teaching us to use faith employ similar 
means? He speaks with convincing assurance: 
“Believe in God;” and some venture at His word. 
In life and in death He rests Himself upon His 
unseen F'ather, and turning to us, says, “Follow 
Me;” and more are induced to trust by His ex- 
ample. But He goes further, and promises to 
be with us alway, our Comrade in the life of 
faith, Himself our inspiration and stay; and 
with Him we commit ourselves to His and our 
Father’s hands. 

Or suppose he is trying to make men see how 
tragically possible it is to know the unsearchable 
riches of Christ and still be a pauper in soul. Are 
you familiar with the story of a Scotsman who 
played a role in the development of the State of 
California? His name was James W. Marshall. 
He had knocked about the world, seeking a, liv- 
ing, and came to California, and found employ- 
ment in a saw-mill in the Sacramento Valley. 
There in the year 1848, while watching the mill- 
race, he saw something shining in the sand and 
reached down and picked up several nuggets. 
He and his employer used the sulphuric acid test 
and convinced themselves it was gold. The news 
of his discovery flew over the land, and in 1849 
occurred the rush to the gold fields. For several 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 187 


years many millions in gold were mined in that 
valley, and fortunes made. Marshall worked 
with the rest, and occasionally struck rich finds, 
but he never held on to his wealth for long. 
After some years he was discovered in poverty, 
and a small grant was made him by successive 
sessions of the legislature. But one day in the 
‘eighties a party of campers entered what ap- 
peared a deserted cabin not far from the spot 
where the gold had first been seen, and found his 
dead body. A monument—a big bronze efiigy— 
was put up to his memory—the memory of one 
who discovered that which made many wealthy 
and himself died in abject penury. And 
such men are in every congregation, familiar 
from childhood with the spiritual treasures of the 
Gospel, accustomed to seeing others in posses- 
sion of them, sometimes seeming to own them 
themselves, but living and dying Christless. 
And this brings me to a final point upon the 
kind of sermon a preacher will give when he is 
seeking to bring men to decision. ‘Theme, text, 
illustrations, will not make an _ evangelistic 
preacher. You may recall Bagehot’s remark 
upon Mr. Gladstone’s oratory: “A. man must 
not only know what to say; he must have a vehe- 
ment longing to get up and say it.” One need 
not enlarge upon that. If there be anything 


188 WHAT TO PREACH 


under the sun in which a man has a keener inter- 
est than in fellow humans, if there be anything 
of greater worth to himself than the life with 
Christ in God, and if there be anything he would 
rather do than open the door into that life to 
them who are without, let him not stand in a 
Christian pulpit. And for those of us who dare 
to say before the Searcher of hearts that, as we 
know ourselves, this is our desire, let it be 
frankly said that no task is harder and more 
mysterious than preaching. ‘Think what it is 
when it succeeds—a few sentences from the lips 
of a man on fire, and hearers are seeing and feel- 
ing the living God! We have been talking today 
of the technique of preaching, but there are men 
who know next to nothing about it, and by the 
sheer passion of their souls bring those who listen 
to them face to face with the Invisible. Quintil- 
lian put his finger on the secret when he wrote: 
Ardeat orator qu vult accendere populum. By 
all means let us avail ourselves of every sugges- 
tion that may increase our skill, and our life long 
let us give good measure, pressed down, shaken 
together, and running over to the preparation of 
our sermons, but never let us forget that it is 
flame, and flame in which a man’s self is being 
consumed, which illumines and warms. And 
that this may never die down let us tell ourselves 


EVANGELISTIC PREACHING © 189 


that saying of Christ’s which evangelists had not 
room for in their narratives, but which the 
memory of some disciple would not let go: 
“Whoso is near Me is near the fire.” 















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